Apparitions of Things to Come: Edward Bellamy's Tales of Mystery & Imagination — Edward Bellamy

Collected in this volume are nine of Bellamy's finest tales of mystery and imagination. Defying conventional genres, his speculative fiction is far-ranging in mode and theme. In 'To Whom This May Come' we find ourselves on a South Sea Island inhabited entirely by mindreaders; there's the bizarre humor of 'With The Eyes Shut', a disquieting satire on technology gone mad; 'Two Days Solitary Imprisonment' has all of the brooding atmosphere of a modern whodunit. Franklin Rosemount's provocative introduction explores the continuity between these early tales and Bellamy's later utopia, and argues that the changes Bellamy made in his utopia during the last ten years of his life - the withering away of authoritarian features that had marred 'Looking Backward', and the expansion of its libertarian, working class, feminist and ecological dimensions in his last great work, 'Equality' - not only reflected the author's basically positive response to his anarchist, Marxist and feminist critics, but also brought his vision of the future into line with key elements of his own earlier fiction. Illustrated with the collages of Hal Rammel.