Coincidentally, Dodd's book was published a year before the appearance of Edward Bellamy's famous Looking Backward (1888), the great best-seller in its genre (which in turn provoked a spate of dystopian responses).

Dodd casts her fiction in the form of an epistolary novel: Wolfgang, a Swedish aristocrat, writes letters home to his friend Hannevig while visiting New York Socialist City in the year 2050.

[5] As he goes, Wolfgang notes that aquatic life has resisted the persistent and unwearying exertions of the numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty among Cetacea and Crustacea... of all the vertebrate or invertebrate animals, the fish is the least amenable to reformatory discipline.

[7] Dodd paints a picture of a future New York as a dreary conformist society, in which the inhabitants live in identical homes and men and women dress alike.

"[9] Since she is an anti-utopian writer, Dodd does not concentrate on the technological wonders anticipated and predicted by many utopian authors; but she does give her future New Yorkers automatic elevators and bedmaking devices and similar conveniences.