Looking Backward From the Year 2000

by Mack Reynolds

They put him into a hypnotic trance in a sealed room to cure him. Then the house burnt down and he was forgotten....

Until he awoke forty years later and could not-dared not-believe what he saw.

Genres: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Utopia, Fiction

234 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 26, 1976

About the author

Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer. His pen names included Clark Collins, Mark Mallory, Guy McCord, Dallas Ross and Maxine Reynolds. Many of his stories were published in "Galaxy Magazine" and "Worlds of If Magazine". He was quite popular in the 1960s, but most of his work subsequently went out of print.

He was an active supporter of the Socialist Labor Party; his father, Verne Reynolds, was twice the SLP's Presidential candidate, in 1928 and 1932. Many of MR's stories use SLP jargon such as 'Industrial Feudalism' and most deal with economic issues in some way

Many of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, and many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted much that has come to pass, including pocket computers and a world-wide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.

Many of his novels were written within the context of a highly mobile society in which few people maintained a fixed residence, leading to "mobile voting" laws which allowed someone living out of the equivalent of a motor home to vote when and where they chose.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a soft cover edition of this book. It was the worst editing I've ever seen. There were unrelated sentence fragments in the middle of paragraphs in a few different sections, and some thoughts ended mid sentence without any follow up. That being said, the predictions the author had for the future were kinda cool. Some things were suprisingly accurate (the idea of blogging is discussed at length, but not of course labeled as such) Other ideas wern't nearly as sucessful (we haven't done away with money yet) but it was an interesting read. It was a little bleak, and the author used it as a dumping ground for his ideas for the future so it often got pretty bogged down in what were basically dry character monologues. I thought this book was just ok, and the insanely bad editing keeps me from being able to recommend it.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is in the style of those 19th century utopian books that follow a character learning a new society in order to give the readers a "guided tour." There's not much plot or character development, and description is only enough to give an understanding of the society. The point of reading such a book is to explore ideas.

Readers may find a few interesting ideas. I found what left the greatest impression on me was factors that left me feeling unconvinced of the plausibility of the book's premises. The transition to extensive futuristic infrastructure, etc. in just 30 seemed questionable (although if you accept the premises of little military spending and such, maybe possible.)

How did the society reach an essentially post-scarcity society with comfort for all in 30 years? To simplify: Corporate merger-mania created monopolies in each region of the world and government had policies such as taking part of the corporate tax in the form of stock. When a member of the new society is asked whether the corporations took over the government or the government took over the corporations, we're told it wasn't quite either. When asked what happened to the rich, the new society person says the rich are better off in this society because they tend to be better educated, so they are more likely to qualify for desirable jobs. (Which seemed wacky to me as we're told that automation has left most people in the new society without formal jobs. So, why are the idle rich better off because they can get jobs? How many rich people with $2 million incomes are satisfied to have the same possessions as those with $500,000 incomes?) Generally, there seems to be this assumption that the rich and powerful wouldn't fight by hook or by crook to maintain the status quo that they've built their lives around.

[Brown Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a futurology lecture written as a Platonic dialogue, larded with generous quotes from the literature of prediction. This is not a criticism, I simply don't want anyone under the impression that this is a novel.

I do enjoy the irony of Reynolds taking as his POV character a committed capitalist (albeit an empathetic one). Most of the trouble with this work is the same old trouble: technology is much easier to predict than people. Reynolds' technological predictions are uncannily canny, though the details are off of course, but the cultural and socioeconomic predictions are naive and foolish in retrospect. Racists are comfortable being racist, they aren't going to abandon their prejudice in a dozen generations, let alone one. The money people who run the economy aren't going to let go of their oligarchy, not for human decency, not for technocracy. They enjoy being top dogs. They have benefitted from scarcity and exploitation. They love scarcity and wastage.

Anyway. Reynolds' heart is in the right place, and this is a nice dream. I recommend it, though it isn't scintillating reading.

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommend.

More (though not very) inclusive than I expected for a white man in the 1800s. Bellamy has some really interesting ideas for different (better!) ways of structuring society. I highly recommend for anyone willing to entertain hypothetical socialism.

[Leonid Levin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading the book. The author anticipated quite a few inventions that we enjoy now, including mobile phones, world wide web, etc.

I would have loved to live in society described in the book.

The ending is rather unexpected and abrupt.

[Eden Ratcliffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Editing is horrible but overall a good story. It’s interesting how some of the modern world was caught, one of the more positive aspects of futurism that I have read or is it?

[Regine]

Didactic.

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘They put him into a hypnotic trance in a sealed room to cure him. Then the house burnt down and he was forgotten...

Until he awoke forty years later and could not – dared not – believe what he saw.’

Blurb from the 1973 Ace paperback edition

Not so much a posthumous sequel as a ‘reimagining’, Reynolds takes the concept of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel ‘Looking Backward’ and updates it for the Twentieth Century, even keeping the name of Bellamy’s protagonist, Julian West.
In his foreword, Reynolds tells us that this is a distillation of his own hopes for the future and an extrapolation of themes and philosophies of the time. The basic premise is that Julian West, millionaire businessman and socialite of the late Nineteen Sixties has an incurable heart condition and takes the drastic action of putting himself in the hands of an experimental cryonics project, hoping to be woken in ten years when medical progress can solve his problem.
Instead, West is awoken thirty years later into a world where no one wants for anything and only a small percentage of the population work.
The Vietnam veteran and arch-capitalist West is in turns disgusted, astounded and stunned by this new world where all traffic runs underground and almost everything is automated.
The novel bears a strong resemblance to Sturgeon’s ‘Venus Plus X’, particularly in relation to the alternating narrative of past and future, although Sturgeon’s was much cleverer in the contrast between his contemporary scenes and the scenes set in his future Utopia.
The main weakness in this novel is the very high level of infodumping that goes on throughout. The professor who has been in charge of West’s recovery has taken him into his home where he and his daughter answer West’s questions with explanatory monologues about how the world works now.
It has to be said that West’s future seems a very dull place, albeit freed from the yokes of religion and Capitalism. We can only assume this however, as we seldom really ‘see’ any of it. While West acclimatises to the fact he has ‘slept’ for thirty years, he is kept for the most part indoors.
Reynolds certainly did not anticipate the popular return to fresh or organic food (outside the US anyway) since all food production is automated and the populace merely dials for a recipe from the central library database which is cooked and served automatically.
Art is produced as normal (Reynolds’ view of Art is a trifle naive, even for Nineteen Seventy Three) by the artist and then can be reproduced in as many indistinguishable copies as demand requires. No one is paid for anything in the year 2000 since the concept of currency no longer exists.
Although one has to applaud Reynolds for the obvious attention he has lavished on the details of his Utopia, and indeed for his wholesale destruction of religion and World Capitalism in the process, one has to also realise that Reynolds missed a great opportunity to treat this only as a first draft and then to go back and build a more coherent vision around it. It would surely have made more dramatic sense for West to have escaped from his virtual house-arrest and discovered more of this new world on his own, for instance.

[David C. Mueller · Rating 3 out of 5]

LOOKING BACKWARD FROM THE YEAR 2000 and EQUALITY IN THE YEAR 2000 offer a utopian version of America in 2000 written from a liberal perspective. The main character is a rather conservative fellow thrust almost magically into the alternate world presented by the author. Reynolds is primarily concerned with political and economic issues in his books. The reader wonders how America could have possibly made the drastic political and economic changes depicted in just a few decades. There is also the almost humorous contradiction of a future utopia where smoking is harshly banned, yet most of the main characters are shown imbibing alcohol at every opportunity. Still, I admire the author for creating such an ambitious future world; he is obviously very concerned with social and economic justice issues.

[Nazim · Rating 3 out of 5]

a handbook of a futurologist. :D ))))

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved many of the futuristic concepts in this book, but the quality of writing sometimes detracted from the experience.