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Remember when I said recently that I'm generally not a fan of utopias or dystopias? Well, here's a case in point: I stopped reading this book after about 80 pages because it was boring the shit out of me. It was a great load off my mind when I realized last night that I didn't actually have to finish the book if I didn't want to. I mean, I *did* want to finish it, but my experience was that I kept having to reread paragraphs because my mind was completely uninterested in understanding the content. The flesh was willing, but the spirit was weak.
I'm not saying it's the fault of the book either. I actually found the opening section interesting, as the narrator falls asleep and wakes up in the far flung future. However, at that point it became a series of conversations about economics, and I stopped finding it interesting. Theoretically I could be interested in reading about a 19th century view of a socialist paradise, but in practice I find this kind of thing so bloodless and abstract that there's no hook for me.
Now, I've been uninterested in this book for years and years. As I say, utopias have never been my cuppa. The thing that finally got me to give it a try was learning that Homer Eon Flint was a huge fan and considered it a big influence. I certainly got the impression that Flint was something of a socialist, or as least interested in socialist ideas. It comes out most directly perhaps in the novella "The Devolutionist," which is about a binary planet system in which the ruling class lives in luxury on one planet and the working class lives in penury on the other. There is a revolution. However, when describing his own socialist utopia in "The Planeteer," it's much more of a techno-utopia along the lines of John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds. Bellamy is not interested in technology at all, as far as I could tell. It's all industrial relations for him, and, probably more importantly, no conflict or drama. "Oh no, we've solved that problem, old boy, and here's how."
Bellamy seems like a pretty interesting writer when he's describing the narrator's feelings of alienation and confusion about losing the old world and confronting the new, but the economic discussions are just deadly to me. Ah well, on to William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908). More of a weird tale, from what I've read about it.
I'm not saying it's the fault of the book either. I actually found the opening section interesting, as the narrator falls asleep and wakes up in the far flung future. However, at that point it became a series of conversations about economics, and I stopped finding it interesting. Theoretically I could be interested in reading about a 19th century view of a socialist paradise, but in practice I find this kind of thing so bloodless and abstract that there's no hook for me.
Now, I've been uninterested in this book for years and years. As I say, utopias have never been my cuppa. The thing that finally got me to give it a try was learning that Homer Eon Flint was a huge fan and considered it a big influence. I certainly got the impression that Flint was something of a socialist, or as least interested in socialist ideas. It comes out most directly perhaps in the novella "The Devolutionist," which is about a binary planet system in which the ruling class lives in luxury on one planet and the working class lives in penury on the other. There is a revolution. However, when describing his own socialist utopia in "The Planeteer," it's much more of a techno-utopia along the lines of John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds. Bellamy is not interested in technology at all, as far as I could tell. It's all industrial relations for him, and, probably more importantly, no conflict or drama. "Oh no, we've solved that problem, old boy, and here's how."
Bellamy seems like a pretty interesting writer when he's describing the narrator's feelings of alienation and confusion about losing the old world and confronting the new, but the economic discussions are just deadly to me. Ah well, on to William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908). More of a weird tale, from what I've read about it.
