Looking Backward

By: Edward Bellamy

Narrated by: Edward Lewis

The hero is anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. The time is tomorrow. The place is a Utopian America. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty. Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionary's view of the future. It is a blueprint of the "perfect society," a guidebook that stimulated some of the prominent thinkers of our age. John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks, in separate surveys conducted in 1935, listed Edward Bellamy's novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years.(P)2000 Blackstone Audiobooks

Incredibly forward thinking

Again and again while listening to this book I found ideas that I had both argued for and thought were relatively new only to be astounded by Bellamy's foresight. You would never guess that this book was written in the 1800s. Again I was astounded by the modern thinking and views.

socialist utopia

132 years later and Looking Backwards is still progressive in all its ideas for the Future. Equality and Freedom reign supreme over the otherwise corruptible people of the world. Thus the narrative reminds us that there was no "great time" in American history. The poor have always been and if Bellamy's dream isn't realized, they current gap between rich and poor will only get worse.

Proto-Woke Socialist Rhetoric

It is good as a historical study. It is a shame that it was actually tried in the Soviet Union and copied by the Chinese et al with the results being a 100 million dead and billions in slavery...

Poignant Social Criticism

'Looking Backward' offers an uncommonly candid evaluation of the social conditions of late 19th Century America. While some reviewers are understandably preoccupied with the innumerable ways that Bellamy's fictional year 2000 misses the mark, or view his centrally-planned, collectivist political program as naiive, I was impressed by his indictment of the iniquities of the world he lived in and the fictional foil he crafted to highlight those shortcomings. Desparate poverty, greed, and vicious economic competiton are all vividly described. Consequently, I felt the book shined most brightly when casting judgment directly upon 1887, but dims somewhat when expositing the virtues of his utopian millenial alternative.

Bellamy did choose a clever literary device for delivering his optimistic vision, one that Rod Serling would certainly have appreciated, but does not allow his fictional universe to speak for itself. Instead, 'Looking Backward' reads more like a philosophical dialogue than a novel, without much subtlety, plot, or world building. His characters are thin and his protagonist, Julian West, does a rather poor job of defending his own generation from the barrage of disparagement heaped upon it by his new friends in the future - attacks a more realistic character may have instinctively recoiled at. As science fiction or fantasy, the work may not be captivating, but I personally believe Bellamy makes up for the lack of narrative depth with a realistic deconstruction of public attitudes toward the injustices of his time, many of which persist in our own.

Now I see How This Book Sparked a Revolution

Brilliant
Amazing
Smart
Thought Provoking
A necessary for survival in today's social and economic terrain.