LOOKING BACKWARD 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy is something of a historical curiosity that science fiction readers might find curious.
It is among the earliest of science fiction books, but shares more in common with GULLIVER’S TRAVELS by Swift, or UTOPIA by More, or even the TIMAEUS of Plato than it does with genre fiction.
It is not witty nor satirical nor philosophical like these works, nor worth reading. But it is a lecture dressed in the garb of a traveler’s tale of a far land, in this case, a land lurking in the undiscovered future rather than on an undiscovered island.
It is a description in detail of the proposed utopia to be brought on by a socialist World Monopoly written in the heavy-handed lecturing style of a finger-wagging insufferably smug young intellectual. (Bellamy was 37 when he wrote this, but his style is that of a youth ten or twenty years his junior.)
The work has one or two clever bits of writing, but otherwise, is best left to rot on the dustbin of history, where it belongs.
The book is unbearably foolish, jejune, dull and unreadable.
Literally unreadable in my case. I could not wade through the whole mass of vomitously and venomously idiotic writing.
Honesty requires I confess my review below does not purport to be a thorough nor even honest, merely a collection of spleenish reactions provoked by passages of a work I could not tolerate nor finish.
A closer study of the work by someone with a stronger stomach might adduce a more favorable opinion.
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