Looking Backward
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Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, and was first published in 1888.
The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself on the same spot but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U.S.A. has been transformed into a socialist utopia.
The young man readily finds a guide who shows him round and who explains all the advances of this new age, including, for example, drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and community kitchens for busy housewives. Some of the features have since been implemented in modern society, such as credit cards. Although the author was unable to envision the technology that would support some of his predictions in the future—for example, the computer networks required to support widespread use of credit cards—the social and economic changes associated with his predictions were often indeed accurate. For example, the young man is taken to a store which, with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste, resembles a modern consumer wholesaler like Sam's Club or Costco.
William Morris's 1890 utopia News from Nowhere was partly written in reaction against this utopia, which Morris did not find congenial. The book's descriptions of utopian urban planning had a practical influence on Ebenezer Howard's founding of the garden city movement in England, and on the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles.
The book was re-written in 1974 by American Science-Fiction writer Mack Reynolds as Looking Backward from the Year 2000.
In the heat of the Great Strikes of 1877, Eugene Debs, a dedicator to unionism and socialism, still opposed them and argued that there was no essential reason behind the conflict between capital and labor. However, when Debs read this book, he was deeply affected by the vivid socialistic commnunity. He soon helped to form the American Railway Union. With supporters from the Knights of Labor and from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on Strike in June 1894. This came to be known as the Pullman Strike.
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