Looking Backward

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by the American journalist and writer Edward Bellamy, first published in 1888. It was translated into several languages and sold in enormous numbers.

Julian West is a young man of the Boston middle class who suffers from insomnia and is treated with a form of hypnosis that puts him into a long sleep. He wakes in the same place more than a century later, in the year 2000, and finds a country that has been reorganised along socialist lines. The rest of the book is an account of that world as it is explained to him: the nationalisation of industry, an industrial army that organises production and distribution, and arrangements intended to guarantee that culture and leisure are available to everyone rather than to those who can pay. Bellamy presents the transformation as a solution to the problems of capitalism rather than as a catastrophe, and the novel is as much a political argument as a story, which is why it was read so widely in its own time.

The book was one of the founding texts of American utopian fiction, and its popularity produced a movement of readers who tried to put its proposals into practice.