The Watson: The narrator's role in the story is to be shown around and have everything explained to him.In a pivotal moment in William Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere, William Guest asks Old Hammond to explain how the socialist society of the future is governed.Utopia: And the title is a nod to the original ambiguous coinage of the word, which could mean either "Good Place" or "No Place".Time Travel: The framing device, as the narrator falls asleep and wakes up in a utopian socialist future.Solar Punk: A utopian novel from the late 19th century in which an author-insert character named William Guest travels to the year 2002 to find Britain transformed into a decentralized, egalitarian, and ecological paradise where the government has been turned into a dung market, people administer their communities through participatory democracy, war and poverty are distant memories, and even money no longer exists.Exposition: Most of the characters are this to some extent, but especially Old Hammond, who spends several chapters just sitting and telling Guest about the utopia's history and workings. Meaningful Name: William Guest, who spends most of the novel as a guest in the utopian society.Hand Wave: At one point the narrator sees cargo barges driven by an unknown power, which one of the locals describes as "force-barges." The narrator decides to let the matter slide instead of asking how they work.Grumpy Old Man: Exactly one character is dissatisfied with the utopia: a grumpy old man who is sure that things must have been more interesting in the old days that he's read about, when there was still economic competition.Fish out of Temporal Water: The narrator.
William Guest travels from 1889 to 2002, so neither the destination year nor the time gap is a round number - but it's the same time gap used in Looking Backward, which was written a couple of years earlier and set in the rounded year 2000. Exty Years from Publication: Played with.Author Tract: News from Nowhere is really just a means for Morris to describe his vision of a socialist utopia.Author Avatar: The narrator is clearly this.Arcadia: Morris's vision of a future following a socialist revolution is this.News from Nowhere was written as a riposte to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a similarly structured Author Tract about a possible socialist future, but one which Morris hated for its utilitarian drabness. The narrator, William Guest, falls asleep and finds himself in the 21st century, in an idyllic agrarian society created following a socialist revolution. News from Nowhere is a utopian novel published in 1890 by William Morris.
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