Bellamy, Edward. Looking backward : 2000-1887, Cambridge, Mass : Belknap Press, 1967.
It is 2000, and Julin West has awoken from a deep-sleep began in his native Boston over one hundred years ago, to find himself in an alien United States. His hypnotic sleep has propelled him into a socialist utopia more than 100 years into the future, where all his questions and confusion about the society surrounding him are helpfully answered by the attentive Doctor Leete.
Leete shows West through modern-day Boston, and explains the many changes that have made much of the drudgery and oppression of the capital-labour relationship a thing of the past. Workers retire at 45 now, may eat in any public kitchen they chose, can consume public art and objective, publicly owned media (both in the press and at home, via 'cable telephone'), and shop on state-provided credit at co-operatives that have done away with the profit-motive.
Bellamy's political treatise was extremely popular, and led to the establishment of over one hundred clubs to propagate its ideas, throughout America's industrial north at the end of the 19th century. The book also influenced such great American labour figures as Eugene Debs, and inspired a series of replies and parodies.
