Looking Backward
Written by Edward Bellamy in 1888, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 was one of the first real Utopia novels in America.
The novel is about Julian West, a Fish Out of Temporal Water, who falls asleep in the year 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000, having slept for 113 years, three months and 11 days (a clever palindrome, 113311). When he awakes, he finds his country has undergone a (supposedly) bloodless Socialist revolution. He proceeds to get lectured on how everything works for a majority of the book by the condescending Dr. Leete, who apparently doesn't do anything else. These lectures comprise entire chapters and discuss things like education, jobs, shopping and such in the year 2000, and how obviously better this utopia is than the year 1888.
Oh, and there's a cheap love story, as Leete's daughter is named Edith, as was Julian's former fiancée. Instant romance, just add water.
Whether it is actually a novel is debatable, as the elements that typically make up a story are underrepresented (aside from pure chapters of exposition). With no real conflict, Looking Backward actually comes off more as a socialist treatise with plot tacked on in order to make it sell more copies.
Available online at Project Gutenberg.
- Author Tract
- Fish Out of Temporal Water
- Hilarious in Hindsight (In 2000, information is carried through a nationwide series of pneumatic tubes.)
- As opposed to a big truck?
- Token Romance
- Twenty Minutes Into the Future
- The Verse (Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality, and various other authors of the time wrote spin-offs)