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Roberts, J W

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1824-1900) US newspaper publisher and author of Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893), a Dystopia designed as its subtitle indicates to rebut Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1888 (1888). The rich young protagonist, with the aid of a scientist whose potion puts him into Suspended Animation for a several decades, awakening to find America riven by War between what seem to be tanks; with his fiancée he goes back to sleep, awaking in Bellamy's version of 2000, whose failures he is instantly able to detect: monstrous Cities (a typical target for American thinkers of the time); a class system enforced through a Lamarckian form of Eugenics (see Scientific Errors), with machines turning out identical workers. The heroes then jump to 2025, where a clement form of nineteenth-century capitalism has won out (see Economics), and stay there. [JC]

John Wesley Roberts

born Waynesville, Ohio: 19 December 1824

died Oskaloosa, Kansas: 23 October 1900

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