A review by circularcubes
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy
3.0
On second thought, this is not a good summer for me to be reading such a book. Boston in the year 2000 is too far removed from my summer abroad, and I think this book deserves much more in-depth thinking than I have the time to give to it right now. I need to re-read this in the wintertime in a few years, when I can better compare the the United States at the time of the writing of the book, at the time when I give this book a second looking over, and the fictional utopia of the year 2000. I can't help but feel like Bellamy has written a society with major flaws in it, or maybe the concept of an industrial "army" makes me uneasy. I also want to give more thought to the place of women in this futuristic society, and I would love to learn about some of the reactions to this book. Who were its most fervent supporters, what were the arguments of the detractors?
On another note, Bellamy is so evidently not a novelist that it's comical. The plot of this book is laughably bad, although it is obviously minor in comparison to its socialist ideas and futuristic inventions. The plot twists revealed at the end of the book were quite clear from its beginning pages, and the love declarations seemed so out of place after so many chapters detailing the workings of that futuristic society. I regard it as a bit of humor to break up all that deep thinking. I must applaud Bellamy, his work could have been dry and painful to get through, but this is a rather accessible way of getting his message across.
On another note, Bellamy is so evidently not a novelist that it's comical. The plot of this book is laughably bad, although it is obviously minor in comparison to its socialist ideas and futuristic inventions. The plot twists revealed at the end of the book were quite clear from its beginning pages, and the love declarations seemed so out of place after so many chapters detailing the workings of that futuristic society. I regard it as a bit of humor to break up all that deep thinking. I must applaud Bellamy, his work could have been dry and painful to get through, but this is a rather accessible way of getting his message across.