Looking Backward (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): 2000-1887

By Edward Bellamy

This pioneering and highly influential 1888 utopian science fiction novel tells the story of Julian West—who submits to hypnosis in 1887 only to wake up in the year 2000 in an idealistic Christian-Socialist America. Under the guidance of Dr. Leete, West is introduced to such future developments as credit cards, shopping clubs, and cable television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Dec 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411463509

Edward Bellamy

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American journalist, novelist, and political activist. Born in Chicopee, Massachusetts, he was the son of Baptist minister Rufus King Bellamy and his wife Maria. Educated at public school, he attended Union College for just one year before abandoning his studies to travel throughout Europe. Upon returning, he briefly considered a career in law before settling on journalism. Before his life was upended by tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bellamy worked at the New York Post and Springfield Union. After his diagnosis, he sought to recuperate in the Hawaiian Islands, returning to the United States in 1878. Thereafter, he pursued a career in fiction, publishing such psychological novels as Six to One (1878) and Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880). His first major work was Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a utopian science fiction novel which became an immediate bestseller in the United States and Great Britain. Its popularity spurred the founding of Nationalist Clubs around the country, wherein readers of Bellamy’s work gathered to discuss the author’s revolutionary vision of a new American society. In 1891, Bellamy founded The New Nation, a political magazine dedicated to the emerging People’s Party. A left-wing agrarian populist, Bellamy advocated for animal rights, wilderness preservation, and equality for women. His novel Equality (1897), a sequel to Looking Backward, expands upon the theories set out in his most popular work and was praised by such political thinkers as John Dewey and Peter Kropotkin. At the height of his career, Bellamy succumbed to tuberculosis in his hometown of Chicopee Falls.

Reviews for Looking Backward (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[datrappert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Of all the books I have ever read, this has probably had the most profound impression. Naive and unworkable perhaps - but if only we could dream like this these days.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book I've intended to read for a long time, ever since learning that Edward Bellamy briefly attended Union College (my alma mater) in the late 1860s. Bellamy's book, which attained great popularity (and also significant ridicule) at the time of its publication, is a utopian manifesto wrapped lightly in the threads of a thinly-plotted Victorian romance novel. Bellamy goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to a Boston much changed, and a bulk of the book is spent in dialogue with his interlocutor about how society has been reformed in the intervening century. Heavy-handed? Yes. A bit clunky? Yes. But also thoroughly interesting to see what a utopia might have looked like to a resident of the 1880s (covered sidewalks, radio broadcasts, centralized production eliminating the need for strikes, &c.).Worth a read as an example of historical utopianism, if nothing else.

[csweder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In college, I took a class on Political Literature--a class designed to expose political and historical thoughts and feelings through literature. This would have been an excellent addition to such a class's curriculum, as I feel it is more political commentary disguised as fiction than it is fiction about politics.

Looking Backward is the story of a man who goes to sleep in 1887 Boston, and wakes up in 2000 Boston. (It is fiction, remember so this kind of jump can happen.) He awakens and learns of the incredible advancements society has made. Indeed every person is cared for, every person works, there are no poor, there are no crimes. The president serves 1 five year term (after being voted in my the army), and Congress meets but once every few years--and really doesn't make any new laws. Every man and woman is taken care of, given the same amount of 'credit' (money is a bad term, but it is essentially the same thing--a card that gets the same amount put onto it every month, and it isn't allowed to accumulate) regardless of how much they work or what they do. The genders are equal. People seem happy.

While it sounds like socialism, Bellamy is clear on this point: it is not. In fact it is capitalism. Extreme capitalism not in the way of Freidman and his associates, but capitalism in that everyone in the nation (and all nations by this point are run this way because it just makes more sense) works for one company--the nation. The county produces everything, and everyone gets an equal share. If there are certain types of work that are harder than others, those occupations work less hours.

An interesting look into how the evolution of capitalism does not have to mean only a few at the top succeeding, but in fact, the evolution and support of us all.

[perlle_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not so much a novel as long descriptions of the author's idea of a future utopia. Some really creative ideas. Others a bit scary. A few, like the chimneys and the awnings were just hilarious. Worth for it the glimpse at the past more than the future.

[aethercowboy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Falling into a hypnotic sleep in the year 1887, the protagonist of LB, Julian West, awakes to find himself in the year 2000. Boston has turned into a socialist utopia, and the people guide Julian through their future land, showing him how all things are improved by their lifestyle, ranging from social hierarchies to technological advancements. He finds true love and has to come to terms with whether or not his is actually dreaming this splendid future.A sort of allegory for Bellamy's social beliefs, LB provides an interesting glimpse of a potential future, idealistic as it seems. If you could handle "controversial" political works such as The Jungle or Native Son, or if you're a big fan of utopian works such as More's Utopia or Plato's Republic, you might just enjoy this book.

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A utopian political tract, more interesting for its glimpse into 19th-century radical political idealism than its literary qualities.

Although largely forgotten today, 'Looking Backward' was apparently a runaway bestseller at the time of its publication, spawning dozens of social clubs devoted to improving society in ways inspired by Bellamy.

The ideas are a combination of idealistic and disconcerting.

Some of the ideas are noble and truly something to aspire to - for example, the idea that every person in a society has a right to share in the wealth of that society, and to live with dignity, without want. However, there's also a uniformity and social authoritarianism that many modern people may find repellent.

When Bellamy imagines a mega-store, he sees a temple-like place of fountains, marble, and a virtually unlimited selection of quality merchandise. When I think of a mega-store, I think WalMart.
Bellamy's vision depends on the belief that human beings are, at heart, naturally peaceful and cooperative, and that if people are given a good education, the opportunity to do what they're best at, and all the necessities of a comfortable life, crime and conflict will naturally disappear. Sadly, I disagree. I'm more of the opinion that people will always find an excuse for conflict, and that if everyone is on equal footing, each person will still find a way to try to rise higher than another. If private commerce is banned, black markets will arise.

Although Bellamy specifies that his utopia arises naturally from capitalism, without violent revolution, and that the bureaucratic and administrative tasks of the nation are overseen by a team who have no personal power or self-interest in the matter (no dictators in sight), there are still disturbing similarities to Nazi propaganda here. (Bellamy's vision, here, is undeniably one of a form of National Socialism - without the hatred, intolerance and bigotry that political movement came to be associated with.)

By chance, shortly after reading this book, I read a book review of a volume that sought to explain the rise of the Third Reich. I don't think the author's theories were correct. I think that reading this book, with its vision of a peaceful, united nation with a patriotic, healthy, fully participating and content citizenry, is far more explanatory of how radical ideas can capture the imagination of a people.

Still, it's refreshing, in this era of dystopias and apocalypse, to read something from an era when people widely dreamed that the future might be better, not worse, than the present day.

[jjmcgaffey · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As it says in the blurb and intro, it's really not a novel, just a novelized presentation of a utopian future. It is fun to read, but Bellamy skips over all the real problems - even accepting what he says about how everyone was ready for the change all at once, what changes first? How jobs are managed? How the President is elected? Who is and isn't part of the 'industrial army'? How people feel about work and pay? He very much took the easy way out by 'looking backward'... Not to mention how poorly he handled women - there's the 'industrial army' which is all the men except the professional men (doctors, etc). Then there are three separate 'armies' - professional men (never any suggestion of professional women), imbeciles (including blind, deaf, retarded, crippled...), and women. Uhuh. Suuuure. Well, it's interesting to read though rather stupid when you start analyzing it - an interesting glimpse into one man's mind at the end of the 19th century.

[beau0p0laurence · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

a 19th c. man wakes up to a future in which every thing is absolutely equitable. ah, such utopian dreams!

[darthdeverell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy tells the story of Julian West, who goes to sleep in a hermetic chamber and finds himself waking “exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days” after he retired for the night, now in the year 2000 (pg. 31). In the future, Dr. Leete explains to him how the United States and the world became a socialist utopia, with people working jobs that bring them satisfaction and knowing that they are bettering society. Further, without money, people receive what goods they want free of charge. These same goods are instantaneously delivered without the chaos and pressures of commercialism.Bellamy discusses the transformation of the future in generalized terms, focused as he is on the larger ideas of human improvement and the betterment of society, but this works to his advantage as advances in technology would normally lead to the novel feeling too dated. Some of his few examples include a predecessor to debit cards and the use of electronic music. Interestingly, though he does not give much detail about fashion, West’s reaction to modern clothing reflects the general stability in men’s wear since the mid-1800s: “It did not appear that any very startling revolution in men’s attire had been among the great changes my host had spoken of, for, barring a few details, my new habiliments did not puzzle me at all” (pg. 40).The popularity of Looking Backward – second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur in its own time – led to the creation of Bellamy Clubs which arose to discuss and promote Bellamy’s socialist utopian ideas and fostered several utopian communities. In many ways, the ideas Bellamy describes closely align with those Gene Roddenberry discussed in his Star Trek franchise. As a work of science fiction focused on time travel, Bellamy’s book predates H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine by seven years, though it lacks a time machine and instead relies on the protagonist sleeping through the passage of time, like Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fût jamais from 1770, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle from 1819, and Wells’s other time travel story, When the Sleeper Awakes from 1899. Though Irving and Wells remain familiar to modern audiences, Bellamy’s work speaks to ideas that seem all the more relevant in the early twenty-first century amid the actions of oligarchs and the effects of late-stage capitalism.

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The crazy thing about this book is when it was written. The main character travels far into time and 'looks backward' into the past. The future has changed dramatically, but so much of what the author writes is applicable to 2018, which is a bit creepy to think about but also interesting. In the age of populism and Trump, this is recommended reading!

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What I find most interesting about Looking Backward is how contemporary readers of the work are willing to dismiss is it as nothing more than a failed attempt to accurately predict the future, as if Edward Bellamy was nothing more than another hokey Criswell predicting homosexual cities in giant undersea aqua-domes. Whenever Bellamy is mentioned these days in reference to Looking Backward, there's a good chance it is done so out of contempt, or to even imply that he wasn't worth mentioning in the first place. In The Fickle Muse by media critic and popular culture guru Paul A. Cantor, for example, he states that "Edward Bellamy, in his otherwise eminently forgettable 188 utopian novel Looking Backward, correctly forecast the invention of the radio, which he cleverly called 'the musical telephone.' By the end of the paragraph, it becomes apparent that his main reason for bringing this up at all is to set up an amusing jab at Howard Stern. "Eminently forgettable" is a remarkable way to describe a book that was not only one of the three top selling novels of its time (right behind Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur) but managed to spawn its own political movement. We might not be quoting Looking Backward in Facebook memes, but that shouldn't obscure the impact that the novel made at the time of its release. As psychologist philosopher Erich Fromm pointed out in his forward to an edition of the book, "Three outstanding personalities, Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Edward Weeks, independently making a list of the twenty-five most influential books published since 1885, all put Bellamy's work in the second place, Karl Marx's Das Kapital being in the first."Utopian novels seem to be less palatable to contemporary readers. There's something about classic works being hopeful about the future that leaves a bad taste the collective mouth of today's literary audience. They tend to be more comfortable with bleak Dystopian future worlds full of regret and doom. Perhaps it's more comforting to give up hope. You won't hear anybody claiming that George Orwell got it all wrong because we don't live in a world as oppressive as in 1984, or that Aldous Huxley was delusional because we don't take Soma holidays or play Obstacle Golf like in Brave New World, yet it isn't hard to find yourself tripping over articles like Daniel Hope's "The Accuracy of Edward Bellamy" going out of their way to refer to Bellamy's vision of an idyllic future society as "juvenile enthusiasm" full of "wrong-headedness and wildly unfounded optimism."There has to be psychological reason why current readers find Bellamy's heavenly socialist new world order any less credible than Centrifugal Bumble Puppy or the Ministry of Love. In Looking Backward, upper-class fiancé Julian West goes to bed in his fortified underground sleeping chamber (with the helpful application of some new-age mesmerism) in 1988 only to wake up in the year 2000. Aided and supported by the doctor who discovered him and his attractive young daughter (who looks an awful lot like his future bride from 1988), Julian - and through him, the reader - is given a tour of the utopian future city of Chicago, now almost completely devoid of crime, poverty, or hunger. Even boredom has been stamped out. We're talking the perfect society. Thomas More's quaint little island has got nothing on this place.The Chicago of Bellamy's future is part of a larger system in which labor organization has been taken over by the government, profits are shared through subsidized - well, everything, really - and all wealth created by labor is diverted back into society. In short, everything your conservative uncle warns you about during Thanksgiving dinner. Without a doubt, Bellamy's stab at utopian wonderland is extreme enough that there is something to please and anger most anybody: he gets rid of the lawyers, demolishes capitalism, allows women in the workplace (okay, so maybe he got some things right), fully funds the arts and public recreation, and did I mention that he gets rid of the lawyers?Yes, many of the novel's "predictions" seem far-fetched or implausible, and even downright frightening if you lean to the right of the political spectrum. But what is easy to forget is that utopian novels are usually meant to be filled with over the top idealism, as their extreme versions of unobtainable perfection (the word Utopia itself translating to "no-place") act as satire and/or commentary on current affairs. Despite Bellamy's repeated defense of his description of the next century's rapid cultural evolution, it is much more effective to look at the novel's time travel device as an effective way of highlighting our society's perpetual near-nearsightedness when it comes to changing the current sociopolitical system. In fact, the very name of the book references this theme, although it might be easier to look at it from afar first, as Julian does.When the novel starts out, our young well-to-do hero can only see the flaws in society and the struggles they produce as they affect him directly: his main focus on recent labor disputes over wages is that they are holding up the construction of his newlywed home, and therefore stalling his wedding. Suffering from insomnia (perhaps a symbolic jab at modern man's inability to "dream" of a life other than the one he inhabits), Julian is put to sleep by a mesmerist only to awaken a century later. When the magnanimous Dr. Leete introduces him to the future version of his home city of Chicago, he does so by taking him to the rooftop of his home so he can gaze down upon the cityscape from above. Like the title itself, this moment foreshadows the intent of the novel, which is to attempt to jar the reader from a myopic worldview by introducing him to his own world from a new perspective.It isn't just that Julian gets to see what has become of the world in his absence, but that his tour through an idyllic future forces him to look upon his own time of 1988 as a historical landmark rather than the unavoidable real world. People always have an easier time recognizing change and progress when witnessing it through the filter of time, are more willing to accept radical advances in society and politics after the fact than to comfortably accept that such a thing might happen in their own lifetime. Bellamy, perhaps unintentionally, illustrates this point when he responds to a review of Looking Backward which criticized the brief time-span that the book allows for such massive global change by pointing to historic examples of rapid bursts of societal and cultural advancements. History is so often used as context that the future seems almost inaccessible without the past to claim as context. The book's narrator says as much to the reader directly, as Julian finds himself remarking at one point: "One can look back a thousand years easier than forward fifty." Society struggles when it comes to looking forward and seeing any substantial change.So, Bellamy attempts to usurp this bias for the past by turning the present into the past, and doing so by painting a future that, he claims, is a possible achievement. Yes, it is wishful thinking at its most optimistic, but the contrast it offers is just as informative - perhaps even more so - than the contrast that Dystopian tomes afford us against the worst-case scenario. It might not seem totally feasible that a future would exist in which all citizens share equally in the bounty of their labors, but by taking us through the detailed mechanisms of how this future America manages just that, we are forced to examine the inequalities and shortcomings of the current era and contemplate whether it is more unreasonable to dismiss the offered solutions, or accepting the flaws of the present as unavoidable.Sometimes solutions aren't meant to be practical answers as much as they are to expose us to the problem. Jonathan Swift's suggestion that poor people could ease their economic hardships by eating their children when the couldn't afford food is not, according to most, a reasonable solution, but it not only highlights the problem at hand, but the callous attitude towards that problem by certain segments of society. Of course, Looking Backward doesn't fall as neatly into the category of satire as Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" or Voltaire's Candide, but the literary device of using the extreme and extraordinary to highlight the commonplace is just as effective. It might seem ludicrous to reduce the number of laws to four or five and eliminate lawyers and juries altogether, but this only goes to illustrate the absurdity of a legal system so complex that people must devote their entire lives to studying the law to even begin to understand it. You don't hear anybody knocking Kafka for making the same point in The Trial. But that was a Dystopian novel, so that's a bit easier to accept.Looking Back doesn't necessarily have all the answers, and it might be just as hit-or-miss with its predictions as Back to the Future II - Although you have to give it to Bellamy, he not only predicted credit cards, he called them credit cards! - but the Utopian paradise of the year 2000 that never was still manages to cast a shadow on many societal problems that still exist over a hundred years before Julian's lengthy nap, and maybe that's more significant than Bellamy's failure to predict how little we've managed to change.

[jwarren42 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of science fiction's best functions is as criticism of contemporary society, and this book does that extremely well, both implicitly in the first 200 pages or so, and explicitly in the last forty pages or so. Of course we have to ask is it a proper theoretical treatise on society? No. Is it a particularly good novel? No, as well. Is it an interesting attempt to blend the two things? Yes. More importantly, though, is it an important attempt to update the dialogue as a literary form from it's early Greek genre-constraints? Absolutely.

[la2bkk · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

With the exception of "telephone music" as a precursor to modern day radio, Bellamy's work is less science fiction and more a well written manifesto for Marxism. Unfortunately, Bellamy was more concerned with an unrealistic utopian socialism and criticism of capitalism than historical fact. Two centuries prior, Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" detailed how the colonists attempt at collective farming aka communism discouraged production- in fact, only when the colonists resorted to private land ownership did the settlement produce positive results. The subsequent history of the 20th century has further proven Bellamy's ideas a failure.

[jddunn_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Man, what a crappy socialist utopia. Americans would figure out how to make a socialist utopia as saccharine and colorless and authoritarian as possible, wouldn't we?So, I read this out of historical interest, because it was a landmark work in American leftism, sold millions of copies in the 1890's, etc. I kinda wanted to know what got early American leftists excited. Evidently, it was very-thinly-novelized half-informed hectoring about proto-Marxist political economy. He sketched just barely enough of his utopian future to force the medicine down. For a supposed seminal work of scifi futurism, there's just no imagination at all... he even goes so far as to kinda just give up and make his year 2000 Boston look almost exactly like his 1887 Boston, just with less squalor and more monumental architecture. There are a few futurist stabs at what the society and technology of tomorrow would look like, but they're all ancillary and don't seem to have much at all to do with his political and economic vision. I don't know how anyone could have possibly read this for entertainment.And what he does sketch out is not very appealing. He had a big hardon for organizing things on a military footing, and his utopia is awfully authoritarian. The results he posits seem pretty ok, but the means of getting to them are either implausible or would likely preclude those results. And everything is annoyingly, Socratically just-so. And then to top it all off he has the temerity to throw in a totally cloying, shallow, and implausible romance, topped off with a gratuitous double-twist ending, just to mess with us.Ok, ok, I shouldn't be so hard on him. This guy was essentially an amateur, trying to find the best way he could to expound his political ideas to a large audience. And obviously, it worked. I just can't believe this had such broad appeal. Americans must have been absolutely starving for good socialist agitprop back in the Populist Era. I had hoped it would be interesting on its own terms, but it's really only worth reading as a curiosity of historical and political interest, and barely at that.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting 19th century novel depicting a utopian America in the year 2000 where society has abolished all distinctions of rich and poor and there are no politicians, bankers, armed forces, lawyers or any kind of prejudice or injustice. At one level, the depiction is almost laughably unrealistic, but in another shows the type of idealism that held sway in some quarters in the late 19th century (the author says in a postscript that he expects society to have moved in this direction in the lifetime of the children of the 1880s, if not that of the adults). The story is told through the medium of an 1880s gentlemen who is hypnotised to help him sleep, but oversleeps and wakes up 113 years later. There is a twist and a counter-twist at the end that keeps the reader guessing. Interesting at a philosophical level, if not in terms of realism.

[servuslibri_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward: 2000-1887” is a novel in which he presents and describes his Utopia. It is well worth reading, and may be enjoyed by both those who are pleased and horrified by his vision.Written in 1887 and set in Boston, the plot involves a sleeper (Julian West) who awakens in 2000 from a nap of over a century. He is introduced to his new world by the family of Dr. Leete, who discovered and revived him. There is also a love story with a twist between the Leete daughter and West, but the majority of the work concentrates on the socialist-Commune society. Many aspects of this could be discussed, but space permits me only a few. First, the story-line used lets us very neatly see the highlights of Bellamy’s vision without any dirty details of how it came to being. So what is his Utopia?Bellamy was very much a Yankee, and was familiar with the works of Karl Marx. Some of Marx is co-opted into his result, but the whole is rather more French, and served with a Yankee flavoring. The living arrangements seem largely based on the French commune Utopian plans of the mid-nineteenth century, while some of the features of government and society evoke issues being debated today in our courts and congress, So how did Bellamy have them come out?Egalitarianism won over American equality, government won over any other form of organization. He even quotes the French goals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The expected working life was age 20-45. There was only one form of organization, that of the U.S. Army. The government owned all the houses (you rented), factories, farms, and distribution centers. Everyone got the same size paycheck, from birth to death. There were unions, but they looked more like European guilds. Since all were equal, they had no problems with crime or greed; there were no brokers, lawyers, or salesmen; and the standard wage (equal for all) was about the equivalent of $150,000 a year. Everyone had a rank, from private to general, but got the same pay. Sounds great, doesn’t it?But, except for the pneumatic tube delivery system, everyone in Boston got everywhere by walking. All the neighborhoods were largely the same. Since everyone went to basic college (age 17-20), they were all educated, similar in outlook, and lacked any impulse to cheat the system and any greed for more than normal consumption. If that sounds good to you, and you can believe it, this is your kind of Utopia. If you, like me, cannot believe it, then some of its features sound like hell. Either way it’s a great read, and gives much to think about. You should be aware that this was a very popular book about the time that the first wave of ‘Progressivism’ began to hit the US.

[iubookgirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this as part of a course on social movements. Most course readings are dry and dull, but this kept me interested. Thank you to Jack McKivigan for forcing me to read this classical rendering of utopian societies.

[danconsiglio · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Early socialist propaganda disguised as a utopian dialogue. It's as exciting as it sounds! I'm glad that I read this, though I didn't actually enjoy the process of reading it. Bellamy provides a well detailed look at the ideas of 19th century (military ) socialism. From a historical perspective it's a kind of cool to see where the communists got their ideas. From a reading-a-book-for-fun perspective this book is a steaming, dense pile of dog shit. This is your great-great grandfather's socialism, not your crazy uncle's. Suggesting this to friends will not help them see the value of a single payer health care system. It might help them to understand what you are saying when you bitch about how all profit is theft. They may still not agree with you, but it might help. Also they will hate you for making them read through the Victorian love story bits. I'd just read a few web reviews and call it a day. Power to the people!!!

[jmattas_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A socialist utopia, which tells of a world in which I'd very much like to live, where everybody is all happy-happy-joy-joy. The transition from harsh capitalism to the new order is not so believable, but the description of the socialist system and of the flaws of scattered capital is very attractive, and it made me think, why indeed it couldn't be like that. If only people could be less selfish and greedy...This book still has a lot to give, because Bellamy's prophecies have not fulfilled themselves. I think that today we are further from any possible dramatic transition than in the 1800's, because there is much less extreme poverty, people "kind of get along", and this doesn't excite revolutions.Bellamy states that in a humane socialist nation, the true potential of humans, as given by God, is finally realized. It's an interesting question, whether people are born good or bad, but settling the issue by invoking a deity is not a very satisfying answer.The dialogue is attractively old-fashioned, and apparently even this radical writer couldn't foresee the evolution of the sexes.

[maxwellt-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Socialist/comunist BS

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There was a time once when this was revolutionary. I was impressed by what it correctly foresaw, but disappointed about how much that this utopia was still influenced by the antiquated ideas about gender and the past. As for socialism itself, the whole idea seems to have trappings of utopianism.

[mmoj_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To think we really aren't any closer.

This is a book to make you think. Wording is a bit dated and some may become bored with that but I found it interesting.