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Apr. 1st, 2013 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynSo I have a tablet computer, right? Asus Transformer whatever model happens to be the color of Megatron and Twilight Sparkle, I've forgotten. Doesn't much matter at the moment. It does decent word processing, it does Internet, it does a good number of Android games, it does e-book reading. Understand that I have no particular interest in e-book editions of modern books; I want publishers to keep putting them out on paper. The public domain is another story. Old, old works of literature or nonfiction aren't always that easy to find, especially if you don't know which ones you might be interested in in the first place. When I got the Transformer, I spent a good couple of hours roaming around Project Gutenberg downloading things left, right and center. Figured I wasn't depriving anybody of much this way, and if I found a particular classic that I ever really liked I could then go out and buy a paper copy since I had the author's name and title in hand. Everybody wins.
One of the items I pulled down was Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. It's the story of a man who goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the far distant utopian future of the year 2000. What it mostly is, is Bellamy's way of justifying about a hundred sixty pages of exposition about his ideal socialist- sorry, Nationalist- society in a hundred seventy page book. The society he posits is kinda... um. I spent an awful lot of the reading time going "Yeah, but... we tried that and... um. That's not going to... seriously, that won't work either. No, I- no, seriously, that didn't work at all." His major cure for the horrible inequities of the late 19th century's society was to have every single industry everywhere nationalized and every single person tested for aptitude, ability, etc. and given the chance to work in the profession of their choice after three years in the 'no, you don't get to pick' category of labor, with what amounted to 'from each according to his ability, to each according to just how hard he actually lives up to that ability' as the unspoken slogan. It relied really, really heavily on society collectively going "Well, hell, individualism and every man for himself is just making each of us poorer and unhappier- how about we all simultaneously treat every single other human being alive as if he or she was our beloved brother or sister?", too. (I could go on in more detail, but another author later wrote a book called Looking Further Backward, set twenty years after Looking Backward, in which his thinly veiled exposition is basically an extended deconstruction of everything wrong with Bellamy's proposed society. I'm planning to read that one next.)
There were other aspects of it that were interesting- for instance, he came up with a system of musical entertainment that almost resembled modern radio, in that you could touch a device at any time during the day and hear music played for you from a central location. Granted, this involved using a telephone with mounted speakers, and the music was played live by musicians in every city rather than prerecorded. He also posited a cashless economy based on the use of credit cards, although in his case it was because his society had abolished money and the credit cards were used to mark off how much of your yearly labor you had exchanged for this or that household good- with paper punches, because again, 1887. Some of his other casually mentioned innovations and ideas were also fascinating.
But what actually got my attention the most strongly was the fact that he did take some time, in maybe two or three chapters, to try to get inside his protagonist's head about stuff other than 'good Lord the society here is different from my vastly inferior and horribly smelly native society'. He did a really excellent job, I think, of capturing what it must have been like for poor Julian West to wake up more than a hundred years after he went to bed and look around him and go 'holy God, everyone and everything I ever knew is dead- what and who am I, in this bizarre new time?'. I couldn't help but think those parts ought to be of interest to anybody writing Captain America... oh, and I might note that West was engaged to be married when he took his long nap, and that the girl he ultimately ends up with (SPOILER ALERT- book is over 100 years old, statute of limitations has expired but I'm being nice anyway) is the direct descendant of his fiancee, who remarried many years after Julian was presumed dead; I seem to recall there's something similar going on with Cap and the women in his life, at least in older Marvel comics (END SPOILER).
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/bellamy/ch08.html is the major 'what now?' chapter that I remember. The whole book's available online if you want to have a look.
One of the items I pulled down was Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. It's the story of a man who goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the far distant utopian future of the year 2000. What it mostly is, is Bellamy's way of justifying about a hundred sixty pages of exposition about his ideal socialist- sorry, Nationalist- society in a hundred seventy page book. The society he posits is kinda... um. I spent an awful lot of the reading time going "Yeah, but... we tried that and... um. That's not going to... seriously, that won't work either. No, I- no, seriously, that didn't work at all." His major cure for the horrible inequities of the late 19th century's society was to have every single industry everywhere nationalized and every single person tested for aptitude, ability, etc. and given the chance to work in the profession of their choice after three years in the 'no, you don't get to pick' category of labor, with what amounted to 'from each according to his ability, to each according to just how hard he actually lives up to that ability' as the unspoken slogan. It relied really, really heavily on society collectively going "Well, hell, individualism and every man for himself is just making each of us poorer and unhappier- how about we all simultaneously treat every single other human being alive as if he or she was our beloved brother or sister?", too. (I could go on in more detail, but another author later wrote a book called Looking Further Backward, set twenty years after Looking Backward, in which his thinly veiled exposition is basically an extended deconstruction of everything wrong with Bellamy's proposed society. I'm planning to read that one next.)
There were other aspects of it that were interesting- for instance, he came up with a system of musical entertainment that almost resembled modern radio, in that you could touch a device at any time during the day and hear music played for you from a central location. Granted, this involved using a telephone with mounted speakers, and the music was played live by musicians in every city rather than prerecorded. He also posited a cashless economy based on the use of credit cards, although in his case it was because his society had abolished money and the credit cards were used to mark off how much of your yearly labor you had exchanged for this or that household good- with paper punches, because again, 1887. Some of his other casually mentioned innovations and ideas were also fascinating.
But what actually got my attention the most strongly was the fact that he did take some time, in maybe two or three chapters, to try to get inside his protagonist's head about stuff other than 'good Lord the society here is different from my vastly inferior and horribly smelly native society'. He did a really excellent job, I think, of capturing what it must have been like for poor Julian West to wake up more than a hundred years after he went to bed and look around him and go 'holy God, everyone and everything I ever knew is dead- what and who am I, in this bizarre new time?'. I couldn't help but think those parts ought to be of interest to anybody writing Captain America... oh, and I might note that West was engaged to be married when he took his long nap, and that the girl he ultimately ends up with (SPOILER ALERT- book is over 100 years old, statute of limitations has expired but I'm being nice anyway) is the direct descendant of his fiancee, who remarried many years after Julian was presumed dead; I seem to recall there's something similar going on with Cap and the women in his life, at least in older Marvel comics (END SPOILER).
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/bellamy/ch08.html is the major 'what now?' chapter that I remember. The whole book's available online if you want to have a look.
