Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ɛrɛhwɒn/[2]) is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist.

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries).

[5] Many dismissed this as a joke, but, in his preface to the second edition, Butler wrote, "I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr Darwin's theory to an absurdity.

[6] In a 1945 broadcast, George Orwell praised the book and said that when Butler wrote Erewhon it needed "imagination of a very high order to see that machinery could be dangerous as well as useful".

Karl Popper's book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), includes and epigraph from Erewhon that reads, "It will be seen ... that the Erewhonians are a meek and long-suffering people easily led by the nose, and quick to offer up common sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises among them who carries them away ... by convincing them that their existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of morality.

In his book, A Testament (1957), Frank Lloyd Wright mistakenly attributes the origin of the term Usonia as an alternate name for the United States of America to Samuel Butler in Erewhon.

[14] Erewhon Market is the name of an upscale Los Angeles-based natural foods grocery chain originally founded in Boston in 1966.

New Zealand sound art organization, the Audio Foundation, published in 2012 an anthology edited by Bruce Russell named Erewhon Calling after Butler's novel.

[23] In the 2019 Ubisoft video game Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, "Erewhon" is the name for the world's settler hideout and players' online hub.

[24] A copy of Erewhon figures prominently in the video for "A Barely Lit Path," the lead single from Oneohtrix Point Never's 2023 album Again.