In the novel, Morris tackles one of the most common criticisms of socialism the supposed lack of incentive to work in a communist society. The book offers Morris' answers to a number of frequent objections to socialism, and underlines his belief that socialism will entail not only the abolition of private property but also of the divisions between art, life, and work. Ellen herself is a multidimensional figure: a working class woman emancipated under socialism, she is also a benign nature spirit as well as the soul in the form of a woman. 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. The journey on the Thames is both a voyage through society transformed by revolution and a quest for happiness. Dick and Clara are good comrades and the married lovers who aid Morris in his wanderings. Old Hammond is both the communist educator who teaches Morris the new world and the wise old man of romance. As Morris, the romance character, quests for love and fellowship-and through them for a reborn self-he encounters romance archetypes in Marxist guises. 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 novel explores a number of aspects of this society, including its organisation and the relationships which it engenders between people. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no marriage or divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems.

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. It was first published in serial form in the Commonweal journal beginning on 11 January 1890.

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

Morris news from nowhere