RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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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
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
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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