MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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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
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
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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