Looking Backward From the Year 2000

Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) was an incredibly prolific sci-fi writer, mostly active in the '60s and '70s. He wrote over sixty books, and could be remarkably prescient about technological change. In this book he even foresees social media! What's more he had a definite political perspective, which he expressed in the range of utopias/dystopias depicted (usually set in the early 21st century) and in all sorts of comments and observations dropped into his novels. But what was this perspective? Well, if you really want to know, it's set out in this book. The title may sound familiar. That's because this book (written in 1973) is a re-write of the book "Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887" by Edward Bellamy, published in 1888. It was massively influential on huge numbers of socialists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - everybody from Social Democrats to Bolsheviks. This was despite the fact that Bellamy deliberately didn't call himself a socialist and was oppsed to class struggle and violent social change. Those influenced included Mack Reynolds' father (a lifelong activist in the Socialist Labour Party in the USA), and MR himself, nominally active in the party for 21 years. It's the same plot (more or less), same characters (more or less), same character names(!). The central character is a wealthy man put into a deep sleep who wakes up in the year 2000. He comes to realise that even the rich would be better off living in a world with no private property... just like in the Bellamy book. Like the original, the book has a certain obsession with exploring the psychological trauma of finding yourself in a completely different era from the one you were born into. But it's a lot less dull to read than the original, and it's got all the usual Mack Reynolds quirks that definitely weren't in Bellamy. Essentially, though, MR really was a Bellamyite. His only real criticism of Bellamy was that Bellamy was a utopian and MR rejected any idea of utopia - human societies always change, there is no final perfect form to arrive at, solving one set of problems creates others... However, he did embroider his Bellamyism with all kinds of additional bits and bobs of social speculation, a lot of which comes from 1960s "futurology" - the rate of social and technological change accelerates ad infinitum . Then there's some denunciation of the Vietnam war (not yet over when the book was written). Unusually for MR (who generally wrote about women in a creepy, soft-porn fashion), he even incorporates a bit of feminism: "A true love could only be maintained between peers, between equals. As long as woman had been the undersex, dependent upon a man for her living and that of her children, real romance was largely a farce. Love cannot reach its heights between inferiors and superiors. Now, for the first time in history, at least, true heterosexual love was possible."