Looking Backward

In Looking Backward, well-to-do Julian West of Boston falls asleep for 113 years and awakes to find the world of 2000 fundamentally changed. An old man and his daughter care for him and take him on a tour of the new world. In the new society, a single nationalized corporation-state under a single political party guarantees work, comfort, and luxury to everyone in the "industrial army." Looking Backward is a watershed utopian novel following in the path laid by books like Thomas More's Utopia, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier's The Year 2440. Looking Backward was received with great excitement and quickly became the second-bestselling novel in 19th-century America (after Uncle Tom's Cabin), inspiring political reformers, "Bellamy clubs," and a direct response by William Morris in his anti-industrial utopian novel News from Nowhere. Bellamy himself wrote a sequel in 1897, Equality, which sold well initially but met with less success overall. If you enjoy thought-provoking science fiction that challenges social conventions, you'll be captivated by Bellamy's visionary tale of a transformed America. Perfect for readers who love classic utopian literature and time travel stories with profound social commentary, this influential novel offers both an entertaining adventure and a powerful critique of industrial society that remains strikingly relevant today. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)