[8] Bellamy's novel tells the story of a young American man named Julian West who, in 1887, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later.

He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts), but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000, and while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia.

The young man is awoken to a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age, including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, internet-like delivery of goods.

"[10] The decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873–1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath.

[11] Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms—monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts—began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate.

[17] The Bellamy Library of Fact and Fiction, by William Reeves, a radical London publisher, printer and bookseller was a systematic effort to organize this literature.

[18] The first version of the novel published in China, heavily edited for the tastes of Chinese readers, was titled Huitou kan jilüe (回頭看記略).

This text was later retitled Bainian Yi Jiao (百年一覺 ), or "A Sleep of 100 Years" and in 1891–1892 this version was serialized in Wanguo gongbao;[19] the organization Guangxuehui (廣學會; Society for Promoting Education) published these pieces in a book format.

This first translation, the first piece of science fiction from a Western country published in Qing dynasty China, was done in an abridged format by Timothy Richard.

[20] The novel was again serialized in China in 1898, in Zhongguo guanyin baihua bao (中國官音白話報);[19] and in 1904, under the title Huitou kan (Looking Backward), within Xiuxiang xiaoshuo (繡像小說; Illustrated Fiction).

[21] Though Bellamy tended to stress the independence of his work, Looking Backward shares relationships and resemblances with several earlier works—most notably the anonymous The Great Romance (1881), John Macnie's The Diothas (1883),[22] Laurence Gronlund's The Co-operative Commonwealth (1884), and August Bebel's Woman in the Past, Present, and Future (1886).

The back-and-forth nature of the debate is illustrated by the subtitle of Geissler's 1891 Looking Beyond, which is "A Sequel to 'Looking Backward' by Edward Bellamy and an Answer to 'Looking Forward' by Richard Michaelis".

The resulting work, titled The Present as Seen by Our Descendants And a Glimpse at the Progress of the Future ("Настоящето, разгледано от потомството ни и надничане в напредъка на бъдещето"), generally followed the same plot.

The events in Yovchev's version take place in an environmentally friendly Sofia and describe the country's unique path of adapting to the new social order.

The book had a specific and intense reception in Wilhelminian Germany including various parodies and sequels, from Eduard Loewenthal, Ernst Müller and Philipp Wasserburg, Konrad Wilbrandt and Richard Michaelis.

The largest was Edward Bellamy Association of New York; its honorary members included John Dewey, Heywood Broun and Roger N.

Matthew Kapell, a historian and anthropologist, examined this re-writing in his essay, "Mack Reynolds' Avoidance of his own Eighteenth Brumaire: A Note of Caution for Would-Be Utopians".

The book was in part a memoir of their careers teaching at fabled Balboa High School, but also a re-interpretation of the Canal Zone as a creature of turn-of-the-century Progressivism, a workers' paradise.

A one-act play, Bellamy's Musical Telephone, was written by Roger Lee Hall and premiered at Emerson College in Boston in 1988 on the centennial year of the novel's publication.