Looking Backward influenced the novel Future of a New China by Liang Qichao.[37]
Despite never mentioning the book by name in any of his works, Looking Backward postulated a socialist-fueled utopia that "confounded"[38] Orwell, and his Nineteen Eighty-Four can be seen as a dystopian counterpoint to the utopian genre, of which Looking Backward was a progenitor.[38]: 27 Orwell wrote of Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism that "these optimistic forecasts make rather painful reading."[39]
Looking Backward was rewritten in 1974 by American socialist science fiction writer Mack Reynolds as Looking Backward from the Year 2000. Matthew Kapell, a historian and anthropologist, examined this re-writing in his essay, "Mack Reynolds' Avoidance of his own Eighteenth Brumaire: A Note of Caution for Would-Be Utopians".
In 1984, Herbert Knapp and Mary Knapp's Red, White and Blue Paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama appeared. The book was in part a memoir of their careers teaching at fabled Balboa High School, but also a re-interpretation of the Canal Zone as a creature of turn-of-the-century Progressivism, a workers' paradise. The Knapps used Bellamy's Looking Backward as their heuristic model for understanding Progressive ideology as it shaped the Canal Zone.
A one-act play, Bellamy's Musical Telephone, was written by Roger Lee Hall and premiered at Emerson College in Boston in 1988 on the centennial year of the novel's publication. It was released as a DVD titled The Musical Telephone.
The first 21st-century work based on Bellamy's novel was written in 2020 by American political scientist and utopian socialist William P. Stodden, titled The Practical Effects of Time Travel: A Memoir. The book, which differs significantly from the original, though follows a similar narrative arc, details a female protagonist's journey, via time machine, to a future where need has been eliminated via a strong Universal Basic Income and National Service Program, while cooperation has replaced competition. The book also discusses a strong influence of technology and robotics in freeing humans from grueling manual labor. The book focused heavily on moral and ethical theory and ethical socialism, rather than materialism, as the ideological foundation of the utopian society.
Looking Backward from the Tricentennial: A Timely Tale of Nonviolent Revolution was a post-pandemic retelling of Bellamy's novel. While keeping the main characters and some details of the original, it portrayed Julian West as a formerly incarcerated Black man waking up (via cryonics) in 2076. The utopian future was the result of a radical revolution of values based on the lessons of Martin Luther King, which were combined with game theory to stage a nonviolent revolution in the ballot box. The American Union Jobs Program, a form of unconditional basic income, was implemented using monetary reform, unlocking a path to addressing King's triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. A variety of tutors school Julian in the details of monetary theory, the principles of nonviolence, the workings of the people's legislative assembly which has crowdsourced Congress, and the application of game theory to electoral politics. The novel concludes with Julian West time traveling back to 2023, hoping to implement the new paradigm and prevent the United States from undergoing a civil war.
See also
- Equality Colony
