Equality: In the Year 2000

INTRODUCTION

Almost a century ago, an obscure, unsuccessful writer named Edward Bellamy wrote a novel. Looking Backward, the success of which was as much a surprise to him as it was to the rest of the world. Indeed, it shortly became the most influential Utopian book ever written. Sales were in the millions; it was translated into twenty languages: countless editions were issued and it has never gone out of print. It deeply influenced such men as John Dewey. William Allen White, Norman Thomas, Thorstein Veblen. Franklin D. Roosevelt reported that in his youth, it was his “Bible.” Not too long ago, when a committee of three literary personalities—John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks—was named to designate the twenty-five most influential books published since 1885, Bellamy’s novel was voted unanimously as second only to Marx’ Das Kapital.

But a century is a longtime, and although Looking Backward is still highly readable, even inspiring to those who envision a better world, it is very dated. Much of what Bellamy foresaw in portraying his future society has already been accomplished: much can never be.

So it was that I had decided to use the fundamental plot, the basic characters, and aim for the same goal as did Bellamy—a portrayal of the world in 2000 A.D. as it might be if man comes to his senses. The novel, dedicated to Edward Bellamy, was entitled Looking Backward: From the Year 2000.

As mentioned, Bellamy was amazed at the reception of his Utopian story. All over the country, “Bellamy Clubs” sprang up, particularly in the colleges. Thousands of letters poured in, praising, criticizing, questioning, sometimes reviling various aspects. In defense, he wrote a sequel, expanding his ideas, going into more detail. It was entitled Equality, was unsuccessful, and soon disappeared from the scene.

The present writer finds himself in the same predicament. Letters began pouring in—not all of them flattering. In defense, I have written my own sequel. Equality: In the Year 2000.

Though a sequel to Looking Backward: From the Year 2000, this novel can be read without a knowledge of the first book. However, it will do no harm to have a brief summary of what has gone before.

When Julian West, playboy multimillionaire, is informed by his doctor that his heart gives him at most two years to live, he seeks out the top authority on stasis—placing bodies into artificial hibernation. With the hope that science will evolve to the point where his disease is curable and he can be revived, he creates a foundation to finance the radical experiment.

Julian had expected it to be a matter of a few years at most. He is flabbergasted to be awakened thirty-three years later in the apartment of Academician Raymond Leete, his wife Martha, and daughter Edith. They have been given the task of helping him adjust to the geometrically developing changes.

Leete points out that since 1940, when Julian was a child, human knowledge has been doubling every eight years, so that now the race has 256 times the knowledge that prevailed then. The computers and automation are in full swing, so that only two percent of the population are needed to produce all that the country can consume and ninety-eight percent are on Guaranteed Annual Income. There have been radical changes in government, in industry, in the arts and sciences. Julian finds himself at sea in almost every field. Money is no longer in use, so all his efforts to perpetuate his fortune were meaningless. Cities no longer exist, nor wars, nor pollution. nor the threat of the exhaustion of the planet’s resources—none of the problems of his own time. There is no crime, no juvenile delinquents or the use of drugs.

He cannot believe so many changes could take place in but a third of a century. Leete asks him to consider, in comparison, the changes that took place between June 1914… June 1947. the same length of time.

The book ends with Julian disillusioned with this world as a Utopia—at least for him. Interlingua, an international language, has been established and the new generations do not even speak English. The Leetes had been especially trained to take care of him, as an interesting experiment. But the generation gap is such now, with human knowledge over 250 times greater than in his youth, that Julian cannot even communicate with the average person. When he proposes to Edith, she points out the impossibility. And he is too far behind, at the age of thirty-five, to ever catch up. By the time he got through the equivalent of grammar school, human knowledge would have doubled again.

He says, in despair, “I’ve been calling this Utopia, but it isn’t. For me, it’s dystopia, the exact opposite. I’m a freak. Why did you ever awaken me?”

Edith shook her head sadly. “It wasn’t my decision to make, Julian. I was against it.”