I'm reading a lot of utopian fictional literature at the
moment; stories set in an imaginary world far better than reality. The word utopia literally means "no
place", with a touch of irony. These readings are part of my research for
my own new novel, Roswell Revealed in
which I have to envisage the world after UFO Disclosure, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/roswell-revealed-sample-first-chapter.html.
News from Nowhere is a book
originally serialized in a newspaper in 1890 and was penned by the democratic
socialist William Morris. It tells the story of a man who goes to bed one night
in at his home in London in the
contemporary late nineteenth century and wakes up in a world a hundred and
fifty years in the future that is transformed. London
has ceased to exist as a big city and is instead a loose collection of
settlements surrounded by gardens, farms, forests and fruit trees. A few of the
original buildings are there, including the Houses of Parliament, but they are
now used as a market for manure (some might argue that's what we use them for
in the real world). The first-person narrator describes this future idyll in
enormous detail. The houses are well-designed and decorated; the men are all
strong and handsome and the women are all beautiful. He falls in love with one
of them called Ellen. The people wear colourful clothes and they spend their
time making artworks, having social gatherings and engaged in work that is so
enjoyable that it, in itself, has become a form of leisure that people actively
seek; and they covet it when it's not available to them. The weather is warm
and sunny the whole time. He meets an old man who tells him that in the 1950's
there was a revolution that destroyed the existing unjust order of capitalist
exploitation and replaced it with a society based on stable stateless
anarcho-communism. Morris was a friend of Frederick Engels and he knew Karl
Marx. News from Nowhere, despite its
title being a half-smile to the meaning of utopia,
is clearly inspired by The Communist
Manifesto. Morris' imagined Marxist paradise is somewhat primitivist. A lot
of the industrial technology of the Victorian era has been abandoned and people
have returned to farming by hand, for the simple reason that it is more fun.
There is an innocence and naivete to the unapologetic and affectionate way
Morris portrays his setting. This was a book about socialism written long
before the Bolshevik revolution and all the other excesses and atrocities of
the twentieth century as people attempted to put Marx' theories into practice.
At that time Marxist ideas were unsullied by real world experience. Amazingly
there are many similarities between the scenario of News from Nowhere and its antithesis "Galt's Gulch", the
imaginary anti-communist and ultra-capitalist idyllic society created by Ayn Rand for
her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-fountainhead-by-ayn-rand_29.html.
One very interesting element of the story is near the end when the characters
are taking a trip up the river Thames to a farm in Oxfordshire
to join in with a harvest when they pass a cargo barge sailing downstream. The
story goes: "Both on this day as
well as yesterday we had, as you may think, met and passed and been passed by
many craft of one kind and another. The most part of these were being rowed
like ourselves, or were sailing, in the sort of way that sailing is managed on
the upper reaches of the river; but every now and then we came on barges, laden
with hay or other country produce, or carrying bricks, lime, timber, and the
like, and these were going on their way without any means of propulsion visible
to me; just a man at the tiller, with often a friend or two laughing and
talking with him. Dick, seeing on one occasion this day, that I was looking
rather hard on one of these, said: 'That is one of our force-barges; it is
quite as easy to work vehicles by force by water as by land.' I understood
pretty well that these 'force vehicles' had taken the place of our old
steam-power carrying; but I took good care not to ask any questions about them,
as I knew well enough both that I should never be able to understand how they
were worked, and that in attempting to do so I should betray myself, or get
into some complication impossible to explain; so I merely said, 'Yes, of
course, I understand'." Is he talking about free energy here? That
concept is very openly discussed in Atlas
Shrugged and by 1890 there may well have been rumours of a cover-up. Because
of its age, News from Nowhere is today
available in the public domain online, see: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3261/3261-h/3261-h.htm
and as an audiobook, see: https://librivox.org/search?title=News+from+Nowhere&author=Morris&reader=&keywords=&genre_id=0&status=all&project_type=either&recorded_language=&sort_order=catalog_date&search_page=1&search_form=advanced. But it is still in print if you like traditional paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Nowhere-Other-Writings-Penguin-Classics-William-Morris/0140433309.
See here for
background: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/energy-politics-and-ufos-2015.html,
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