Earth Revisited - Genre

Genre

Brooks sends his protagonist from the late 19th century into the future to experience a vastly improved world. His novel is one of a stream of such books that appeared in the late 19th century. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) was the most famous, popular, and influential of these; and Earth Revisited has been dismissively called "One of the stepchildren" of Bellamy's book. Yet Brooks's novel can be usefully compared to an earlier work in the genre, John Macnie's The Diothas (1883). Both books share some particular ideas (like communal food preparation for private homes); and the concept of reincarnation is fundamental to both, which is not typical of the utopian literature of the era as a whole.

Like many other utopian novels, Earth Revisited also verges on science fiction in its anticipation of future technologies. Notably, Brooks envisions contact with intelligent life on the planet Mars: topographic features are engineered as signals between the planets. (On the Earth, a large equilateral triangle, a hundred miles per side, is constructed in the Great Plains.) Brooks also foresees a vast land reclamation project that turns the Sahara Desert into a region of lakes and farmland.