Butler’s publications, beginning two years after Peacock’s had ended,[97] extended through the next half century, _The Way of All Flesh_ and _Notebooks_ being posthumous. But the three decades bracketed by the two Erewhons were the fertile ones. Through them flowed steadily a stream of many currents; satiric, scientific (mainly controversial), classic, critical, descriptive, expository, musical, and artistic. Of all these volumes only three can be classed as fiction, and one of those falls in the other group. Our present interest centers upon _Erewhon_ and its sequel. There is no more effective satiric machinery than that of the Foreign State, or Adventures among Strange People. It may take the form of a serious though perhaps fantastic conception with incidental satire, as in _Utopia_, _New Atlantis_, _The Coming Race_, _Modern Utopia_; or a travesty of these, an inverted pyramid, made grotesque by the dominating satire, though none the less freighted with serious intent, as _Gulliver_, _Journey from This World to the Next_, _Erewhon_. From the fact that _The Coming Race_ and _Erewhon_ may be cited as examples of the same literary genus, though of different species, comes the suggestion that the real complement of Butler is Lytton. It does happen that they furnish the only two instances on our list of the exercise of this particular kind of creative fancy.[98] Lytton’s tale pictures a positive ideal, which satirizes our inadequate reality by acting as a foil to it. Butler’s narrative portrays a supposed reality, of which the visitor does not approve; and his comments satirize our accepted reality by a subtle, indirect reflection. Our race placed beside the “coming” one merely looks small, inferior, incomplete, yet all it needs is growth. But if the barrier could be leveled between our country and the one Over the Range, the two would confront each other and see their own images, not as in a glass darkly but as in a brilliant yet tricky and distorting mirror. Our actual beliefs and practices, shorn of the verbal illusions we have spun around them, and pushed to their logical conclusions, would become the naked _reductio ad absurdum_ we view in the Erewhonian philosophy of illness, crime, science, religion, life, and death.[99] In _Erewhon Revisited_ we see a mental sequence even more interesting than the dramatic sequel. _Erewhon_ was followed the very next year by _The Fair Haven_. The former supplies the stage setting, the latter the central idea, whose combination makes the Revisit a seemingly artless but really astounding _tour de force_, an uncanny offspring of logic and fancy.