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Mass market paperback, 222 pages
Acquired July 2001Published 2000 (originally 1888) Previously read 2001/02(?) Reread January 2013 |
by Edward Bellamy
No contemporary reader can enjoy Looking Backward, I suspect. I don't think it was the first utopian sleeper narrative (that curious subgenre where someone wakes up in the future and it is awesome), but it was certainly the most influential; Bellamy's book definitely inspired News from Nowhere (1891), James Ingleton (1893), Looking Within (1893), The Time Machine (1895), and The Sleeper Awakes (1898-99, rev. 1910), among many many others. Certainly this influence wasn't due to Bellamy's command of plot or character, however; instead it was because of critique of his contemporary era and his blueprint for a future one.
Like a lot of utopias, Looking Backward claims to be constructed on rational lines: "no reflection would have cut the men of your wealth-worshiping century more keenly than the suggestion that they did not know how to make money. Nevertheless that is just the verdict history has passed on them. Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production" (160). That's one of many critiques in the book of 1888 society, promoting the idea that as seen from the future, there is no rational justification for the present. It's now a common trope of time travel narratives (Star Trek has had a lot of fun with this over the years), but Bellamy was its popularizer (if not its originator), and it probably accounts for a lot of the novel's power.
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