Looking Backward

"This book came out early, in the 19th century. At that time there were many utopian novels. It’s set in America, where a future socialist state will solve or eradicate all the ills of society of late 19th century American capitalism. The protagonist Julian West doesn’t see those ills at the beginning of the novel: but the author contrives to put him to sleep for 100 years. When he is woken and he adjusts to his new life, he sees how different things are in the future – an industrial society where everyone shares the capital equally. He begins to regard the past, which is the author’s and the contemporary readers’ present, as nightmarish. “If you talk with the people in China’s major cities, sometimes you wonder – why are they so optimistic, so euphoric?” Bellamy is envisioning a better world, that’s his intention. It was supposed to be a utopia, and it was very popular – many people identified with this kind of socialist state at that time, even in North America. But it was criticised too. The world he imagined is a world of nationalistic “industrial armies”, not the kind of artisan-libertarian socialism in another famous utopian novel News From Nowhere , by his contemporary William Morris. It was very prescient, in the sense that Bellamy almost tells the future of a certain Communist country that came two decades later."