This review relates to News from Nowhere. Apparently written as a rejoinder to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which I read recently. Although an engaging work of literature, where LB is really a tract with a thin plot line, News from Nowhere is a much less plausible vision of a 20thC utopia. Machines and mass production have been abandoned in favour of a return to handicraft. The means of production thus require less investment and are shared by the community, as are the products of their labour. Formal education, government, and the courts have disappeared. Private property is minimal, shared lodging and group dining are the norm, and while they were at it marriage has also been discarded and replaced by free love. Many questions about how the economy of this society can provide such a high standard of living for all its members go unanswered. After the narrator, like Bellamy’s a visitor from the past, has an opportunity to observe the visible contrast with his own day he is given an extended account of the revolution which has brought about these changes. Then the story turns to an extended boat trip up the Thames. To descriptions of its natural beauty and the improvements made in the built environment Morris adds a love story. All in all a much more satisfying literary experience than Looking Backward but not much of a blueprint for social change .

Reviewed in the August 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/02/morris-as-socialist-thinker...

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