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Time to return to dystopia
We're now living though the scenarios predicted in novels like 1984 and Brave New World. What can we learn from them about the world today, asks JOHN GREEN
Dystopia now: Brave New World on film
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys an imaginative revival of the dance classic
MARIA DUARTE and JOHN GREEN review Michael, The North, Exit 8, Rose of Nevada
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, John Luther Adams
Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 has been the Bible of anti-communist crusaders for generations and it’s a permanent fixture on reading lists in schools and colleges.
Yet other dystopian novels like Brave New World, written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley — 17 years before Orwell’s work — or Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) are largely unknown today. Why would that be?
1984 was used not only to vilify the Soviet Union but communist and socialist ideas in general. Everyone is aware of the concepts of Big Brother, Newspeak and Doublethink. It’s not really surprising that Huxley’s fiction, probably inspired by the Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, is not better known because its premise that it is capitalism taking us down the road to uniformity and loss of individualism is not one the ruling elite wish to see promoted.
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