Looking Further Backward E-Book

Arthur Dudley Vinton

• Herausgeber: Arthur Dudley Vinton
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

China invades the United States to restore US capitalism in the year 2020 in this dystopian 1890 sequel to Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward. Vinton's novel is written as a series of lectures delivered at Shawmut College (Boston, Mass., USA) in the year 2023 by a Chinese historian who took charge as chief of the history department after the occupation of the socialized United States by capitalist China.Bellamy's novel described a utopian re-organization of the United States where by the year 2000 every aspect of the economy was owned and controlled by the government, which was termed "Nationalism" to avoid the stigma of the term "socialism". Bellamy's best-selling novel spawned 160 Nationalist Clubs in the United States, and a Nationalist political movement in the late 19th century. It also inspired many novels critical of Bellamy's premises, such as this one.Here Vinton fabricates a history of the two decades after Bellamy's story ended in year 2000, during which the entire world, except China, abandoned its capitalist system and adopted Nationalism. Fearing civil unrest fomented by foreign Nationalists proselytizing within China, the Chinese government takes over France in 2012 and launches a military invasion of the United States in 2020 to preempt Nationalization of China and to restore capitalism in the US. Vinton shows the folly of the abolition of a peacetime standing military for defense, the replacement of currency by government-issued credit cards, dis-incentives for personal initiative and thrift, deletion of Presidential war powers, and more, all of which were consequences of the Nationalized system proposed by Bellamy.The story is told in quotations from a diary kept by Julian West, the historian protagonist of Bellamy's novel, which dramatize the events starting when China's warships are approaching various US ports with the intention of landing an invasion by Chinese soldiers. The Chinese professor who took over West's position at the college gives his explanations among the quotations as he lectures to the history students.

Leseprobe

Looking Further Backward

Arthur Dudley Vinton

Published: 1890Categorie(s): Fiction, War & Military, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Dystopia and uchronia

Original Title Page

LOOKING FURTHER BACKWARD.

Being a Series of

LECTURES

Delivered to the Freshman Class

at

SHAWMUT COLLEGE,

By PROFESSOR WON LUNG LI,

(Successor of Prof. Julian West),

MANDARIN OF THE SECOND RANK OF THE GOLDEN DRAGON

AND CHIEF OF THE HISTORICAL SECTIONS

OF THE COLLEGES IN THE NORTH-EASTERN

DIVISION OF THE CHINESE PROVINCE

OF NORTH AMERICA,

NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME,

COLLECTED, EDITED, AND CONDENSED.

BY ARTHUR DUDLEY VINTON.

——

ALBANY BOOK COMPANY

36 STATE STREET

ALBANY, N.Y.,

1890

Dedication

 TO

MOSES TAYLOR PYNE,

A WISE COUNSELLOR, A TRUE FRIEND

AND A NOBLE MAN,

THIS BOOK

IS

DEDICATED

AS A TOKEN OF THE

ESTEEM, HONOR AND ADMIRATION

WITH WHICH HE IS REGARDED BY ALL WHO KNOW HIM,

AND ESPECIALLY

BY

THE AUTHOR.

Preface

 One of the wonders of the age has been the remarkable success of Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward. The reason for this is not hard to guess. The majority of the thinking portion of the community found in this book an echo of their own thought. In a simple and attractive way it set before the public mind the horrible iniquity of the present organization, of society. The comparison of our social system to a coach whereon a few persons sit in indolence, while the vast majority, driven by hunger, toil at the ropes and drag the coach along, has appealed to every honest mind by its truthfulness. A slavery, worse than that which made a nation rise to free the blacks, has risen with a fungus growth and made the rich man and the poor man enemies. Corrupt judges on the bench and partisan grand juries in the precincts of the courts have made one law for the rich and another for the poor. Poverty has become a synonym for dishonor. The possession of money is alone the one source of respect upon earth and assurance of reward in heaven.

The enormous growth of private fortunes and the organization of capital by great corporations have been so sudden, and have so altered our social system from vrhat it was thirty years ago, that men are bewildered at the change. The elder men cannot realize it. It is the younger men alone who see that the chains and shackles which a bloody war struck from the African, are being rivetted anew upon the laboring man. They alone see that the existence of great private fortunes is a menace to the welfare of the State, and that (with a few honorable exceptions) their possessors are public enemies.

In their bewilderment at the new state of affairs, men have asked themselves the old question, "What shall we do to be saved ?" And it is because Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward and Lawrence Gronlund in The Co-operative Commonwealth, have attempted to answer this question, that their books have received so much attention. The benefit which these books have done is very great; but the Utopian schemes which they recommend as remedies for the evils which exist to-day are fraught with danger.

Whatever promises to regenerate mankind or better the chances for life, liberty and happiness, I am heartily in favor of. But a false guide is worse than no guide, and a wrong solution of a great human problem is worse than no solution; and, therefore, I have endeavored in the following story, to point out wherein the Bellamy Nationalism woiJd prove disastrously weak.

Fortunately in these United States, we have no need to appeal to violence, nor to change our form of government to accomplish any desired reform. Theoretically and legally, our government is of the people and from the people, and laws reforming the present abominable oiganization of society can be passed whenever the people are sufficiently enlightened to see the wisdom of enacting them.  The story has been so favorably and publicly criticised while in manuscript, that I am encouraged to hope it may serve a good purpose in print.

Arthur Dudley Vinton.

New York, 1890.

Chapter1 LECTURE I.

HISTORICAL SECTION, SHAWMUT COLLEGE,

Boston, A. D. 2023,

and in the Year of the Great Dragon, 7942.

Won Lung Li, Professor of History,

To the American Barbarians:

I come before you as a stranger. I am born of a race that the race you are born of has for centuries been trained to think of as an inferior race.

I have no doubt that there may be some persons among you who look upon me not only as a man of alien race, but as an instructor placed over you by the force of arms, a director of your thought, a guide to your historical studies, forced upon you by the physical supremacy of an alien nation.

I recognize that such thoughts may be entertained by you. I would not even blame you for entertaining them. I approach my task with diffidence as great as your reluctance to be instructed by me can be. The tongue I speak to you in is not my own tongue. I must invite your attention to events which you must necessarily feel a sense of humiliation in considering, since they evidence the foolishness of your ancestors, and the strange infatuation for impracticable ideas that dominated your immediate progenitors. I must narrate to you a history that you can take little pride in. Mine is the unpleasant task to dwell with you upon the causes that led to what many of you consider your degradation. Having thus besought your favor, I begin the first of those lectures which, as Professor of History in Shawmut College, it is my duty to deliver and your duty to attend.