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Trade paperback, 356 pages
Acquired November 2011Published 2003 (originally 1891) Read January 2013 |
by William Morris
You couldn't move in the nineteenth century for the sequels, prequels, ripoffs, and rebuttals of Looking Backward. Wikipedia claims there were over 150, and I know of some that aren't on that list. Most of what I've read myself is terrible; Morris is one of the few writers to attempt to write one who came up with something halfway decent. Unfortunately, a halfway decent Victorian utopian tract is still a Victorian utopian tract; this is one of those books where some fellows walks around an ideal society being told how ideal it is. (Wells, of course, skewered the whole subgenre in The Sleeper Awakes.) Morris being Morris, everyone in the future loves arts and crafts. One thing I must praise him for, though, is his understanding that social change means revolution and revolution means violence; the narrator's guide says that of course it wasn't a peaceful transition to utopia because the world hadn't been peaceful before utopia: "what peace was there among those poor confused wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it" (148-49). We're cushioned from the violence, though, because it's all told to us in a history lesson. No dead bodies on the page in this revolution!
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