From Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Visions of our - Chris J. Young

45. William Morris (1834–1896). News from Nowhere. London: Reeves &
Turner, 1891.
Much like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere also begins
with a man waking one morning to find himself in a world completely unlike the world in which
he fell asleep. Leaving nineteenth-century industrial London behind him, William Guest wakes up
in the twenty-first century in a communist society called Nowhere. As he travels through the city
he finds that many of the divisions of Victorian England are absent: education is available to all
those who desire it; slums, poorhouses, and factories have vanished; political decisions are made
by all through a majority vote in the communes; and women have been freed from the traditional
gender roles that prevented their advancement. Unlike Looking Backward which saw technology
and industry as methods for creating equality in society, Morris’s metropolis of Nowhere proposes a
rural version of urban life, where people work with few machines and without large-scale industry
to achieve the social equality that was missing from nineteenth-century London.
46. H.G. Wells (1866–1946). A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905.
Considered to be one of the founders of modern science fiction, H. G. Wells began his career as a
dystopian satirist and spent most of his life writing variations on the theme of utopia. Although many
of his earliest works – The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, War of the
Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon – were very much dystopian novels, A Modern Utopia reflects a
time when Wells believed a better society could be created through a new world-state. The story is set
on a planet much like earth, but different in that the inhabitants have created a perfect global society,
a utopia, in which the problems of society have been eradicated through developments in science
and technology. This modern utopia is ruled by the Samurai, a moral and spiritual ruling class that
leads a spartan life to govern the planet. Wells’s core utopian themes in the novel focus on the need
to resurrect a strong sense of civic responsibility, to cultivate a ruling elite, and to harness science and
technology to serve human needs. From A Modern Utopia onwards, Wells unceasingly advocated some
form of new world-state that would solve society’s issues. But as the twentieth century progressed, he
became disillusioned with the idea of a world-state, witnessing the collapse of the League of Nations,
while the world slid into a global war for the second time in a generation.
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