Looking Backward

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, and was first published in 1888. It was written in reaction to the disillusionment with an increasingly competitive and industrial society.

Synopsis

The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself on the same spot (Boston) but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U.S.A. has been transformed into a socialist utopia.

Template:Spoiler The young man readily finds a guide who shows him round and who explains all the advances of this new age, including, for example, drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and community kitchens for busy housewives. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45. The productive capacity of America is commonly owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens.

Although the author was unable to envision the technology that would support some of his predictions in the future, they are frequently compared with actual social and technological developments since the book was written. For example, Julian West is taken to a store which, with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste, somewhat resembles a modern consumer wholesaler like Sam's Club or Costco. Bellamy also predicts classical music being available in the home through cable "radio". Template:Endspoiler

Reaction

William Morris's 1890 utopia News from Nowhere was partly written in reaction against this utopia, which Morris did not find congenial. The book's descriptions of utopian urban planning had a practical influence on Ebenezer Howard's founding of the garden city movement in England, and on the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles.

During the Great Strikes of 1877, Eugene V. Debs, though already a union member, opposed the strikes and argued that there was no essential necessity for the conflict between capital and labor. However, Debs was influenced by the book to turn to a more socialist direction. He soon helped to form the American Railway Union. With supporters from the Knights of Labor and from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike in June 1894. This came to be known as the Pullman Strike.

The book was re-written in 1974 by American science fiction writer Mack Reynolds as Looking Backward from the Year 2000. Matthew Kapell, a historian and anthropologist, examined this re-writing in his essay, "Mack Reynolds' Avoidance of his own Eighteenth Brumaire: A Note of Caution for Would-Be Utopians."

External link

• Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887 at Project Gutenberg
• Available on Eserver