News from Nowhere is an 1890 classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris.

In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

Morris fuses Marxism and the romance tradition when he presents himself as an enchanted figure in a time and place different from Victorian England.

The goal of the quest, met and found though only transiently, is Ellen, the symbol of the reborn age and the bride the alien cannot win.

Morris writes, 'In short a machine life is the best which Mr. Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not to be wondered at then that this, his only idea for making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery … I believe that this will always be so, and the multiplication of machinery will just multiply machinery; I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men's energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be pain; a dream to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are even more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy's utopia would allow them to be, but which will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition.

The practice of women waiting on men at meals is justified on the grounds that, 'It is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do so that all house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her.

When dealing with marriage and divorce Old Hammond explains, ‘You must understand once for all that we have changed these matters; or rather that our way of looking at them has changed…We do not deceive ourselves, indeed, or believe that we can get rid of all the trouble that besets the sexes… but we are not so mad as to pile up degradation on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles about livelihood and position, and the power of tyrannising over the children who have been the result of love or lust.

We rather encourage them to do it; they learn to do things for themselves, and get to know the wild creatures; and you see the less they stew inside houses the better for them.’[7] Here Morris breaks away from the traditional institutions of 19th century England.

[8] This Utopia, an imagined society, is idyllic because the people in it are free from the burdens of industrialisation and therefore they find harmony in a lifestyle that coexists with the natural world.

I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; it is the allowing of machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.

'[9] The title News from Nowhere has inspired many enterprises, including a political bookstore in Liverpool,[10] Tim Crouch's theatre company[11] and a monthly social club.

Its patron is Peter Hennessy, historian of government, and it meets monthly in the church hall of St John the Baptist's, Leytonstone,[12] about four km from the house where the artist grew up, now the William Morris Gallery.

A contemporary art exhibition at the Lucy Mackintosh Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland, with six British artists: Michael Ashcroft, Juan Bolivar, Andrew Grassie, Justin Hibbs, Alistair Hudson, and Peter Liversidge during April–May 2005 was called News From Nowhere.

[citation needed] The animated video "News from Nowhere" (2022, 5 min) by Maltese artist and curator Raphael Vella is loosely inspired by William Morris’s novel.

Composed of around 1000 frames, this stop motion animation presents a more dystopian version of the narrative, in which the artist wakes up to a world on fire.