The story of the transformation from the nineteenth-century capitalist-industrial society is explained to the narrator by an old man who has made a study of the revolution that brought about the change. Before the outbreak of armed revolt, conditions for the common workers grew gradually more intolerable, and unions banded together in an organization similar to the AFL-CIO. The establishment ordered the machine-gunning of unarmed protesters, and the people finally learned how to fight back. Certain features of this history are reminiscent of the French Revolution, but others actually foreshadow developments and actions which occurred in the twentieth century, like the firing into the crowd of protesters in Petrograd by the Czarist guards.
Morris's utopia is the natural outgrowth of his lifelong devotion to two causes: first, his Pre-Raphaelite conviction that the workman of Medieval times was a happy man and a fulfilled artist, and second, his political involvement in the Socialist movement.
Morris, like Bellamy, predicts a brighter future for mankind, with men and women equal, healthy, and happy; but he differs radically in his discarding of "modernity" with its advancing technology and complex organization. In fact, Morris was provoked into writing News from Nowhere as a refutation of Looking Backward.
H. G. Wells devotes much of his attention to previews of possible future developments of civilization that are predominantly optimistic. Among the better known of his publications in that field are: The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Awakes (1899), A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
