William Morris

News From Nowhere William Morris

News from Nowhere, written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris in 1890, combines utopian socialism and soft science fiction. In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society, there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work. News From Nowhere was written as a libertarian socialist response to an earlier book called Looking Backward, a book that epitomizes a kind of state socialism that Morris abhorred.