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Looking Backward 2000-1887

Author: Edward Bellamy

If The Time Machine was, in part, a response to News from Nowhere by William Morris, then News from Nowhere was in turn a response to Looking Backward. Morris didn't find Bellamy's version of Socialism to his taste, but in responding to it, he even borrowed the structure of Bellamy's novel. In this novel, Julian West falls asleep in the latter part of the 19th century, and wakes up in Boston in the year 2000. But this is a America that has been transformed into a Socialist paradise, and the novel mostly consists of West being taken around Boston to see how much better everything is. The more uncongenial the job the shorter the hours everyone works, food is freely available to anyone who wants it, people retire at 45, there's something resembling a credit card, and culture is piped to the home by a sort of telephone. Why it's on the list: Bellamy's novel had an immediate and extraordinary effect. Bellamy Clubs sprang up all across the United States, a mass political movement was born (called, confusingly, Nationalism), Marxist writings of the day kept referring to the book, and there were even utopian communities that modelled themselves on the novel.

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