Writers of utopian fiction generally need to set their imagined societies either in a remote place (as in Sir Thomas More's original Utopia and many imitators), or in a different time.

[2] Griffith was however the earliest American writer to project her protagonist into the future to encounter a vastly improved social order.

Many successors would follow her example; most famously, Edward Bellamy used the same trick in his Looking Backward (1888), as did many of the writers who produced sequels and responses to his work.

The same tactic is exploited in John Macnie's The Diothas (1883), W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887), Elizabeth Corbett's New Amazonia (1889), Bradford Peck's The World a Department Store (1900), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Moving the Mountain (1911), and other works.

Another, later book, published in 1881 by William Delisle Hay, was given the same title (Three Hundred Years Hence or A Voice From Posterity), probably in ignorance of Griffith's earlier but then-obscure work.