BELLAMY, Edward

(1850-1898)

   US author and journalist, the latter from 1871, when he abandoned the practice of law before having properly begun it; no lawyers exist in the AD2000 of his most famous work, the UTOPIA Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and its sequel, Equality (1897), whose influence in the 19th century was enormous. His early works of fiction were Gothic; though sentimental and labouredly influenced by Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, they are nevertheless strangely moving. They do not, however, show any great hint of the direction his work would take. Dr Heidenhoff's Process (1880), although not sf, interestingly prefigures some of the tactics of his later work; the doctor's process claims to mechanically wipe out diseased memories from those who wish for a new start. The protagonist's girl, who has been seduced by a rival, is persuaded to try the process, and is transformed until the last pages of the novel, when it turns out that Heidenhoff and his process have simply been dreamt by the protagonist, who awakens to find that his disgraced lover has committed suicide.The emotional exorbitance and Gothic extremity of this tale are transformed in Looking Backward into a vision of a utopian society whose equally exorbitant realization is achieved while the protagonist, whose confusion upon his arrival into the world of the future is one of the best things in this uneasy work of fiction, has been in hypnotized sleep (SLEEPER AWAKES). The people of AD2000 are devoid of irrational passions and their highly communalized society reflects a reasonableness so radically opposed to common sense that one is tempted to posit an impulse of deep violence behind EB's creation of such a world. William MORRIS was so appalled by the bureaucratic and machine-like nature of EB's utopia that he was instantly driven to retort with News from Nowhere (1890 US), which described an ideal world of a very different sort. EB's book has nonetheless been extraordinarily popular, especially in the USA, which suggests a greater receptivity to communist thought in that country than is generally recognized, and has been treated as a serious model for the positing of future societies by many thinkers and writers, including Mack REYNOLDS. The sequel, an uninspired sequence of fictionalized essays, did little to damage the effect of the earlier book. EB is more important to the history of utopian thought than he is as a writer of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. His influence on the world of GENRE SF, except on didactic writers like Hugo GERNSBACK, has been indirect and diffuse.

   JC

   Other works: Miss Ludington's Sister: A Romance of Immortality (1884); The Blindman's World and Other Stories (coll 1898), especially the title story (written 1885).

   About the author: Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form (1985) by Jean Pfaelzer.

   See also: ARTS; AUTOMATION; ECONOMICS; HISTORY OF SF; MACHINES; MUSIC; NEAR FUTURE; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TECHNOLOGY.