News from Nowhere Add a review

News from Nowhere is an 1890 novel combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. It was first published in serial form in the Commonweal journal beginning on 11 January 1890.

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 Morris's society, there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no marriage or divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. The society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

The novel explores various aspects of this imagined society, including its organisation and the relationships which it engenders between people. The book offers Morris's answers to a number of frequent objections to socialism, and underscores his belief that socialism will entail not only the abolition of private property but also an end to divisions between art, life, and work.

In the novel, Morris tackles one of the common criticisms of socialism: the supposed lack of incentive to work in a socialist society. Morris's response is that all labour should be creative and pleasurable. He differed in that regard from most socialist thinkers, who tended to view labour as a necessary burden, but argued that a well-planned, egalitarian society could reduce the amount of labour required from each worker.

News from Nowhere was written as a libertarian socialist response to Edward Bellamy's popular novel Looking Backward (1888), which exalted a type of industrialized state socialism that Morris abhorred. Morris was also seeking to influence the currents of thought at the time regarding the optimal tactics to bring about socialism.