News from Nowhere

Abstract

The novel follows William Guest, a late nineteenth-century man, who wakes up in the twenty-first century to a socialist England. Guest is immediately accepted and befriended by members of this society, despite obviously being alien to it. Guest’s new friends, apparently fascinated by his lack of knowledge about their way of life, spend a large part of the novel either showing or describing to him how society is now organized and how that shift came about through a revolution. After a few days of travelling through the Thames with some of his new friends, Guest becomes isolated once again as those around him seemingly stop perceiving his presence, prompting him to leave and walk into a cloud of dark fog. He wakes up back in his own time, reflecting on his dream and his feeling that he truly never belonged among them, despite the fast friendship they had formed, as his own living experience was so different from theirs.