PHOTO PROMPT © Lori Wilson

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“Whatever you have on tap is fine.” William hoped he said that right. The woman behind the bar smiled and served him a light ale. Although he superficially recognized his surroundings, everything was different, especially in terms of how people treated each other.

He was served and paid what the man who sent him here told him to. He and his father Robert Owen were going to change the world starting with New Harmony, but that was two centuries ago. After utopia failed, he was granted a boon to see what the future held.

The 21st century wasn’t paradise either.

It’s Wednesday and once again time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 18 October 2024 edition of Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

A quick image search came up with Sara’s Wine Bar in New Harmony, Indiana.

The place has a rich history, but I was especially interested how Scottish industrialist Robert Owen, his son William, and their friend Donald McDonald imagined they’d create a utopian community in New Harmony characterized by “a New Moral World of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity through education, science, technology, and communal living.”

Apparently that lasted only a couple of years, with “socialist utopia” failing in 1827. His community…

was based on Owen’s rejection of “three monstrous evils”: private property, organized religion, and marriage.

In addition…

True to his word, in New Harmony Owen attempted to do away with personal assets, transformed the Harmonist’s houses of worship into civic centers, and discouraged any religious basis for marriage. He envisioned a life in which children would live with their families until age 3, at which point the community would assume responsibility for their care and upbringing. Men and women would live in equality, each bearing equal responsibility for contributing to the work of the community. Workers would be paid strictly according to the amount of time they labored.

I’m spending so much time on this because periodically these ideas crop up in the social and political realm as if they’re brand new and thus destined to succeed (an elder political figure once said that it took a village to raise a child, echoing Owen’s ideals). After all, our national election is next month and the political promises are freely flowing.

You can go to the links I provided to find out more.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

My science fiction short story “Confluence” is available in the Blue Planet Press anthology Far Futures, Book Three – Deep Space.

The Amazon blurb for the anthology describes my story as, “A NASA spacecraft highjacked in a perilous first contact scenario.”

That’s putting it mildly.

There’s also a very short YouTube video marketing the book:

I hope you will consider buying the anthology, reading the stories, and leaving an honest review.

Thanks.