Looking Backward from the Tricentennial

Epigraph/Introduction

Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that the government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Introduction to the 2099 Edition

Written seventy-five years ago during the previous iteration of the Phoenix Cycle, Looking Backward from the Tricentennial was a pastiche of Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 and Mack Reynolds' Looking Backward from the Year 2000 (1973) and contained several lines from the earlier books.

Julian West, the protagonist of all the novels, appeared as a wealthy white man in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions. In the post-pandemic retelling, Julian West was a black man arriving in 2076, astonished by the social, cultural, electoral, legislative, economic, and criminal justice reforms that had taken place. In these novels, his education generally took the form of conversations with his host, Dr. Leete. Looking Backward from the Tricentennial was no different, but it provided a broader cast of educators, often juxtaposing the troubles of Julian's own time with solutions of the modern era.

All three novels painted vivid pictures of utopian futures, but in the first two, the strategy for delivering the envisioned change was left as an exercise for the reader. Looking Backward from the Tricentennial differed by offering a specific plan of action. (For readers interested in the elections of the time, the original supplemental material is included in the Appendices.) By doing so, it established a new but short-lived genre: beta-historian fiction. Near-future events were served up as an invitation for readers to take real-world action in order to influence—for the better—the history that would determine the storylines of sequels, such as Looking Forward to the Tricentennial (2026).