Through a remarkable sequence of events, West awakens in the year 2000 to find that the poverty, conflict and ugliness of his own era have been forgotten by all but historians. The social Darwinism of the late 19th century has long since been replaced by an egalitarian order in which all industry is owned by the state. Men and women alike are drafted into a vast ''industrial army'' that handles the necessary work of society. Domestic drudgery has been abolished, thanks to a system of cafeterias and laundries. Nor is money used any longer, having been replaced by credit cards.
Public spaces are clean and artistically appealing.
And telephone wires carry orchestral music right into the home. West ventures some predictable 19th-century objections to the idea that an entire economy can be run on benevolence. They are refuted, in some detail. And all these changes were realized peacefully. Across the decades that West had been sleeping, the growth of monopolies meant that more of the economy fell under the control of ever fewer companies.