Literary works dealing with Undermen, mass-men, subhumans, etc.

[Summer M]

Can you recommend literary works (any length and genre) dealing with the issues of mass-men, undermen, subhumans, and other forms of life that are considered below human? Examples include The Time Machine (the Morlocks) and 1984 (the proles). This subhumanity can be biological, metaphorical, cultural, or anything whatsoever. It may be politically incorrect or even worse. Anything goes.

Thanks.

[kev67]

Ooh, ooh, me, me, me! Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Actually, there was another book I read a year or two ago called The Secret People by John Wyndham, whose most famous books were The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos. It was one of his early books and originally published under another name, John Beynon. It was about a rich young man and his girlfriend. His rocket plane develops a mechanical fault and they have to crash land onto a new lake that is being formed by flooding the desert. From there they are drawn into a complex of subterranean caves where they are taken prisoner by a race of underground pygmies.

[Pierre Menard]

The short story cycle The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith.

A number of the stories deal with animal/human hybrids used as slaves/driven underground. Fascinating, underrated sci-fi writer.

[Shevek]

Frankenstein is a must, in case you haven't read it. The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa is a realistic treatment of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil. Some parts near the end are tedious, when the suspense wears thin, but the stories of newly freed slaves (and the Catholics who make up the main characters) indicate their treatment from the state and landowners as subhuman according to race and class.

[BienvenuJDC]

Les Miserables is all about 'the miserables', so I'd guess it is a book about the culturally subhuman species.

[Charles Darnay]

Hunchback of Notre Dame certainly deals with the subhuman.

[mal4mac]

Victory by Joseph Conrad has three nasty villains, one (Pedro) is presented as sub-human.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

The Tempest (Caliban)

If you want to draw the line a bit higher, then almost any novel by Dickens has deprived and depraved characters almost reduced to sub-humanity.

[Summer M]

If you want to draw the line a bit higher, then almost any novel by Dickens has deprived and depraved characters almost reduced to sub-humanity.

Yes, Daniel Quilp was definitely treading the line there.

[wordeater]

"Notes from the Underground" and "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky
"Das Parfum" by Patrick Süskind
"Le Solitaire" by Ionesco
"Voyage au bout de la nuit" by Céline

[DocHeart]

Russel Hoban's Ridley Walker.

People are reduced to eating each other and drinking each other's blood after a nuclear holocaust.

This one might be of particular interest to you because of its invented language, which is rudimentary and vulgar (even if Hoban's narrator somehow manages to employ it quite eloquently at times).

Regards,
DH

[Jackson Richardson]

I'm not sure if this what you mean at all, but in The Lord of the Rings the orcs were actually created as sub. Smeagol/Gollum has become sub what he was.

(I'm working on the basis that the elves are super-human and the hobbits and dwarves are equal to humans.)

If you're not a Tolkien bird, you won't know what I'm going on about.

[SkyCetacean]

Well it's evidently quite a while since the initial post, but one good book about people who are considered "subhuman," I think is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Now I won't spoil anything, and whether the characters in Never Let Me Go are actually subhuman is an ethical debate all on its own, but I think it's an interesting analysis anyhow.