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 another time. However, Morris carefully steers the story away from this, handling it with a lot more taste than either of the other writers.