News from Nowhere

News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest (1890) is Morris's narrative thought-experiment in answer to the question every technological revolution forces upon the species: now that machines can do the work, what are humans for? The novel's protagonist, William Guest, falls asleep in Victorian London and awakens in a transformed England two centuries hence. There are no cities in the conventional sense, no money, no government. People live in small communities along a cleaned and beautified Thames, making beautiful things with their hands, eating well, loving freely, occupying themselves with the only activities Morris considered worthy of fully human life: skilled craft, artistic creation, care of the natural world, and pleasures of fellowship. It is not political treatise dressed as fiction but a dream—a vision of what human life could look like if the arrangements making it ugly and exhausting were simply removed. Critics mocked it as naive, impractical, medieval fantasy. Morris understood this; the subtitle acknowledges it—"An Epoch of Rest," a resting place for imagination, where