Apparitions of Things to Come

Edward Bellamy's Tales Of Mystery & Imagination

by Edward Bellamy

edited by Franklin Rosemont
illustrated with the collages of Hal Rammel

Publication date: January 1990
Paperback: $12.00
Hardcover: $25.00

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Collected in this volume are nine of Bellamy's finest tales of mystery and imagination. Defying conventional genres, his speculative fiction is far-ranging in mode and theme. In "To Whom This May Come" we find ourselves on a South Sea Island inhabited entirely by mind-readers; there's the bizarre humor of "With The Eyes Shut," a disquieting satire on technology gone mad; "Two Days Solitary Imprisonment" has all of the brooding atmosphere of a modern whodunit. Franklin Rosemont's provocative introduction explores the continuity between these early tales and Bellamy's later utopia, arguing that "the changes Bellamy made in his utopia during the last ten years of his life—the withering away of authoritarian features that had marred 'Looking Backward,' and the expansion of its libertarian, working class, feminist and ecological dimensions in his last great work, 'Equality'—not only reflected the author's basically positive response to his anarchist, Marxist and feminist critics, but also brought his vision of the future into line with key elements of his own earlier fiction."