LOOKING BACKWARD FROM THE FUTURE

When Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward in 1888, he would never have referred to it as science fiction. How could he? Although by the 1860s Jules Verne had begun to produce the speculative adventure novels—Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and many others—that have long been regarded as among the earliest science fiction, there was no label to apply to what Bellamy was doing. Verne called his books Voyages Extraordinaires, which is certainly part of science fiction’s visionary appeal. Like H.G. Wells, whose novels The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) are also considered proto–science fiction, or even Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley (her 1826 novel, The Last Man, takes place in a future world decimated by plague), Bellamy was staking out a territory that had yet to be determined. Projections about technology and the future came face-to-face with contemporary anxieties to create a genre that has since grown so pervasive that many readers take its narratives for granted as the stuff of cliché.

Science fiction, however, has always offered more than is expected. Set in 2000, Looking Backward imagines an America that has done away with war, poverty, and taxes, as seen by a time traveler named Julian West. Like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens 113 years later to a world transformed. He meets a guide who reveals the advances of this society, in which people retire at 45 and businesses have been nationalized. In its time, Looking Backward was a sensation; it sold 400,000 copies in the first decade after its publication and led to the creation of hundreds of so-called Nationalist Clubs in the United States. What this suggests is that the response to the book—and its relevance—had less to do with the world it imagined than with the one in which it appeared.

FUTURE SHOCK

Like so many speculative writers, Bellamy invoked the future as a way of reflecting on issues that concerned him, personal and otherwise. A consumptive who once spent a year in Hawaii on a rest cure, he gave up a career in journalism because of its physical demands. Equally important, he was writing in a time and place, late-19th-century America, that appeared.