News from nowhere; or, An epoch of rest

Supposedly, News from Nowhere was written as a reaction to Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. Instead of a rigidly industrialized, militaristic society, Morris's future is decentralized, centered around artisans, and the people have developed a healthy skepticism against the rule of one man over the other.

In his future, modernity has been tried and found wanting, and most of the novel is spent conveying the complete lack of interest people in Morris's future Britain have against progress and technology.

The novel is still heavy on exposition. Strangely enough, it gets most exciting and realistic when the dark history of the future is revealed; the revolution, the unfortunate suppression of revolutionary sentiment, etc.

For a moment, I was worried that Morris, like Bellamy and Smith, was going to introduce an immature romance into the story; a beautiful woman, predisposed to fall hopelessly in love with the stranger from …

I have been reading Utopian literature for the past four decades. There are other works in this genre which I have enjoyed very much, but I must say that, among pure Utopian visions, this book is my favorite, and the nearest to my own idea of an ideal society. Being 135 years old, there are, of course, a few unexamined prejudices which must be forgiven, but surprisingly few, and mild.

An excellent novel which examines a society that has essentially the same basis as Morris’s imagined future, but set in a much more challenging environment, and with greater emphasis on exploring the challenges such a society might face, is Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Morris calls his Utopia “Communism” while LeGuin calls hers “Anarchism”, but in their tenets there is very little between them.