Apparitions of Things To Come: Edward Bellamy’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Fiction. Edited and with an introduction by Franklin Rosemont. This volume comprises nine of Bellamy’s tales of mystery and imagination, tales which were written before the famously utopian LOOKING BACKWARD, credited with the radicalization of figures from Eugene Debs to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Clarence Darrow. Ever seeking new ways to conceive of the world, Bellamy created fictions that challenge conventional, reified notions of reality, behavior, society or human nature…This is a book…of speculative philosophical fiction at high tension (from the Introduction). Bellamy’s writing is at once critical of things as they are and hopeful regarding things as they might Ghosts of the future/are the only sort worth heeding. Apparitions of things past/are a very unpractical sort of demonology,/in my opinion,/compared with/apparitions of things to come (Bellamy’s epigraph).