The
future's bright, the future's green!
The BBC's movie set in a vegan
future, Carnage: Swallowing the Past (directed by Simon Amstell, and
featuring Grime MC JME) adds to a rich history of vegan Utopias. Not
least HG Wells's debut novel,
The Time Machine.
The
Victorian Vegan Time Machine
First
published in 1895, the novella epitomises the Victorian age. Our hero
explains time travel to a bemused audience through a mixture of
scientific theory and spiritualism. He returns the following week to
recount his experiences. The dishevelled Time Traveller describes a
Utopian society in the year 802,701, populated by the peaceful,
vegetarian people, the Eloi. “Fruit, bye the bye, was all their
diet,” he says. “These people of the remote future were strict
vegetarians... I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs,
had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.”
However,
the Time Traveller discovers the Eloi are predated upon the
subterranean Morlocks, who farm them like cattle. While he watches
the Eloi at play, he muses on their unfortunate plight: “Very
pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the
field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against
no needs. And their end was the same.”
As
much as The Time Machine can be read as a novel about science, social
class, or as a ripping adventure story, it is also a vegan text; a
fruitarian Utopia in which the Victorian Time Traveller falls in love
with the Eloi, his revulsion of the ethics of meat farming and his
plain hatred of its perpetrators, the Morlocks. The Time Traveller
craves meat on his return to Victorian London, which in turn
highlights the savage within Victorian society – one which history
and evolution would eventually tame.
One
person's Utopia is another Dystopia?
Equal
parts beautiful and disturbing, The Animal's Vegan Manifesto draws
heavily from Orwell's Animal Farm in a tale of animal and human
liberation over 115 intricate, painstaking woodcuts. Sue says she
grew up next to a slaughterhouse in Liverpool, which informed her
work and inspired her veganism. That her creative process is so
scrupulous, but subject matter often so often distressing, makes this
book a labour of much devotion from a committed animal rights
activist. Each panel is carved from the wood of wild cherry in a
cacophony of different voices, which reach a joyful conclusion. The
Animals' Vegan Manifesto keeps drawing you back to revisit its
sometimes outstanding beauty.
