YMMV / Looking Backward

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• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In Bellamy's vision of the year 2000, information is carried long-distance via a series of pneumatic tubes. In 2006, Alaskan senator Ted Stevens was met with derision for stating that the internet is "a series of tubes".
  • The author's name is Edward Bellamy. This wouldn't have been all that notable on its own until the publication of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, where the Rule 63 counterpart to Edward is called... Edythe.
• Values Dissonance: Obviously the idea that a command economy would be the best thing ever is controversial enough, given the record of communist states in the actual 20th century. The novel also claims that crimes are just the result of "atavism" (i.e. hereditary throwback traits). People with them are "treated in the hospitals." Just what treatment is unclear, but sterilization would seem to be the most probable, given that this was advocated by the eugenics movement when Bellamy lived (and later became law in twenty seven US states). This was likely based on theories such as those of Italian criminologist and physician Cesara Lombroso's, who believed many criminals were such "atavisms" (of course, they have been long since debunked).

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