"Looking Backward: 2000-1887" is considered to be one of the greatest and most widely read of the utopian novels. In "Looking Backward," Julian West (an aristocratic young gentleman) mysteriously wakes from a sleep of over a hundred years to find himself transplanted to a utopian futuristic world. Waking up in the year 2000, he finds that America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years, the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. Broad streets have replaced the squalid slums of Boston, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, Julian West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveler.
