In 1873, the reviewer in the Dunedin newspaper the Otago Witness declared that Erewhon was the best English satirical fiction since Gulliver's Travels (1726).

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". He recommended the novel, though not its sequel, Erewhon Revisited.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze used ideas from Butler's book at various points in the development of his philosophy of difference. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze refers to what he calls "Ideas" as "Erewhon". "Ideas are not concepts", he argues, but rather "a form of eternally positive differential multiplicity, distinguished from the identity of concepts." "Erewhon" refers to the "nomadic distributions" that pertain to simulacra, which "are not universals like the categories, nor are they the hic et nunc or nowhere, the diversity to which categories apply in representation." "Erewhon", in this reading, is "not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here."

In his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze draws on Butler's "The Book of the Machines" to "go beyond" the "usual polemic between vitalism and mechanism" as it relates to their concept of "desiring-machines":

For one thing, Butler is not content to say that machines extend the organism, but asserts that they are really limbs and organs lying on the body without organs of a society, which men will appropriate according to their power and their wealth, and whose poverty deprives them as if they were mutilated organisms. For another, he is not content to say that organisms are machines, but asserts that they contain such an abundance of parts that they must be compared to very different parts of distinct machines, each relating to the others, engendered in combination with the others ... He shatters the vitalist argument by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question the structural unity of the machine.— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Œdipus
Agatha Christie references Erewhon in her novel Death on the Nile (1937).

A copy of Erewhon figures in Elizabeth Bowen's short story "The Cat Jumps" (1934).

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."

Alan M. Turing references Erewhon in his posthumously published paper, "Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory" (c. 1951). He writes, "At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon."

Aldous Huxley alludes to Erewhon in his novels The Doors of Perception (1954) and Island (1962).

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.

The "Butlerian Jihad" is the name of the crusade to wipe out "thinking machin…

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• Rangitata River – the location of the Erewhon sheep station named by Butler who was the first white settler in the area and lived at the Mesopotamia Sheep Station
• Nacirema – another piece of satirical writing with a similar backwards pun