I enjoyed this book on many levels, which I'll discuss below, but the best part about it, is I've now added about 20 books to my wish list (I'm sure amazon appreciates it!). This book is fabulous as a jumping off point. It describes books well enough to pique your interest--or turn you away,if it's not your style. Plots are discussed only in the minimum; there's never any spoilers. It also discusses actors, writers, and production work of the wonderful series Mystery! The pictures from the shows are beautiful. If you have any interest in the show Mystery, or in adding new authors to your stack to read, take a look at this book. You won't be disappointed.

Once in a while something does come along to rival sliced bread. This book is it. I have had many questions about different mystery series. The latest is when the BBC produced The Dorothy L. Sayers series with Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, why did they stop short and not produce "Busman's Honeymoon"? And the answer is:

"Sadly, Mystery! Viewers never got to see the payoff to this classic romance. Sayers wrote about the marriage in 'Busman's Honeymoon', which couldn't be filmed for Mystery! Because Sayers had sold the film rights to Hollywood in the 1930's; it was turned into the 1940 film 'Haunted Honeymoon', but efforts to secure the rights for the new BBC-TV version weren't successful."

This book is packed with such information and many great stills form many Mystery! programs. Now I need to see the ones I missed.

Mystery : A Celebration is the ideal book to have by your armchair while you watch mysteries like Inspector Morse, Prime Suspect, the P.D. James mysteries, and many others that appear on the PBS MYSTERY series. Don't watch any of these mysteries without MYSTERY : A Celebration. Mystery readers will also enjoy this book. It provides the reader with a listing of titles by mystery authors like Colin Dexter, P.D. James, and others.It provides the reader with biographical information about the mystery authors and actors who are well known for portraying the popular detectives as well.

Other reviews have described the plot, so I won't spend much time on it. A man, Julian West, goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. He finds a socialist utopia.

At first, the book is quite interesting. Bellamy does a good job of capturing the protagonist's surpise and confusion at the new world he discovers. The fact that Edith Leete looks like his fiance back in 1887 Boston is a neat twist. The socialist state the author describes is appealing to me, and as someone who believes that socialism can work, I found it thought provoking.

The problem is, there is not enough story or character development here. Bellamy's ideas aren't really suited to the fictional form. He'd have been better off to write a solely political tract. Because the author can't seem to decide if he wants to write a novel or a political essay, both the narrative and the politics are oversimplified, and given short shrift. The introduction by Cecilia Titchi (pardon my spelling), was excellent. In fact, the book fails to live up to it. If you know nothing about socialism, this book my enlighten you as to the philosophy. If it is an option for a political science class, it would be a good pick because it is easy and quick reading. Otherwise, I wouldn't rush to read it.

I grew up on science fiction, and many years ago read this book and was utterly unimpressed. Over the years, at SF conventions, I would ask other fans if they had read this book. Now these are fans who could regale you with quotes from Star Trek, or Star Wars, and who often had read most of Larry Niven or Andre Norton. But "Looking Backward"? Bellamy? Many had never heard of the book or the author. Those who had read the book often shared my opinion. By comparison, all I asked had read "Time Machine" by Wells, and had seen the movie.

I think it is instructive to compare the two books. Written within a few years of each other, with Bellamy's actually being the first, why did "Time Machine" live on, and the other being relegated to a well deserved obscurity? In fact, "Time Machine" is generally considered the first famous novel that describes the concept of time travel.

Try reading the two books consecutively. Well's story is gripping and dramatic. Bellamy's seems stilted and ponderous. Part of this is just the differences in literary style in the intervening century. But "Time Machine" is still a dashing read. Bellamy's text is a thinly wrapped polemic; a hosanna to his vision of a socialistic utopia. Most of the book is a hectoring lecture as to how late twentieth century Boston is a secular paradise, with the evils of capitalism just a historial curiosity. For one thing, books on utopia do not sell well. Regardless of your personal political beliefs, a book that is soothing and tranquil lacks a certain vivacity and drama.

This book is significant today, but NOT as science fiction. Rather as a guidepost to the socialistic beliefs of a certain subculture of a past century.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the movie!

Having never really heard of this novel or its author before, I was rather surprised to discover how immensely popular it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Edward Bellamy does an excellent albeit sometimes pedantic job of communicating his socioeconomic views and provides an interesting and informative read, despite the fact that the utopia of his fictional creation is a socialist nightmare in the realm of my own personal philosophy. It is very important to understand the time in which Bellamy was writing, especially for a conservative-minded thinker such as myself who holds many of Bellamy's views as anathema. It was the mid-1880s, a time of great social unrest; vast strikes by labor unions, clashes between workers and managers, a debilitating economic depression. Bellamy, to his credit, in no way comes off as holier than thou; his wealthy protagonist recognizes his own responsibility in seeing the world in the eyes of the more prosperous classes, basically ignoring the plights of the poor and downtrodden, having inherited rather than earned the money he is privileged to enjoy, etc. This makes the character's observations and conclusions very impactful upon the reader.

While I do respect Bellamy's views and understand the context in which they germinated, I cannot help but describe his future utopia as nothing less than naïve, socialistic, unworkable, and destructive of the individual spirit. Indeed, it sounds to me like vintage Soviet communism, at least in its ideals. Bellamy is a Marxist with blinders on. I should describe the actual novel at this point. The protagonist, an insomniac having employed a mesmerist to help him sleep through the night, finds himself waking up not the following morning in 1887 but in a completely changed world in 2000. His bed chamber was a subterranean fortress of sorts which only he, his servant, and the mesmerist (who left the city that same night) even knew about, and apparently his home proper burned down on that fateful night and thus his servant was clearly unable to bring him out of his trance the following morning. It is only by accident that Dr. Leekes of twentieth-century Boston discovers the unknown tomb and helps resuscitate its remarkable inhabitant. 20th-century life is wholly unlike anything the protagonist has ever known, and the book basically consists of a number of instruction sessions by the Leekes as to how society has been virtually perfected over the preceding 100 years. There is no more war, crime, unhappiness, discrimination, etc. There are no such things as wages or prices, even. All men and women are paid the same by virtue of their being human beings; while money does not exist, everyone has everything they possibly need easily available to them for purchase with special credit cards. Every part of the economy is controlled by the national government, and it is through cooperation of the brotherhood of men that production has exceeded many times over that of privately controlled industries fighting a war against each other in the name of capitalism.

Bellamy's future utopia is most open to question in terms of the means by which individualism is supposedly strengthened rather than smothered, how a complex but seemingly set of incentives supposedly keep each worker happy and productive, how invention or improvement of anything is possible in such a world, and how this great society does not in fact become a mirror of Khrushchev's Russian state. Such a society consisting of an "industrial army" and controlled in the minutest of terms by a central national authority simply sounds like Communism to my ears and is equally as unsustainable. Of course, Bellamy wrote this novel many years before the first corruptions of Marx's dangerous dreams were made a reality on earth. As I said, I disagree with just about everything Bellamy praises, and I think almost anyone would agree his utopia is an impossibility, but I greatly respect the man for his bold, humanitarian vision and applaud his efforts to make the world a better place. In fact, many groups organized themselves along the lines of the world Bellamy envisioned, so the novel's influence on contemporary popular thought is beyond question. Looking Backward remains a fascinating read in our own time.

I should make clear that the novel is not completely a dry recitation of socioeconomic arguments and moralistic treatises. Bellamy makes the story of this most unusual of time travelers a most enjoyable one, bringing in an unusual type of old-fashioned romance to supply the beating heart of a novel that had the potential to become overly analytical and thus rather boring reading otherwise. He also managed to grab me by the scruff of the neck and shake me around a couple of times with his concluding chapter, quite shocking me with a couple of unexpected plot twists. This great humanist of the late nineteenth century can teach us all something about what it means to be truly human, although I fear that his socioeconomic theories are themselves far too romanticized to have much practical relevance in the lives of modern men and women.