In a dystopia, the citizens can grasp the mechanics of the society they live in, but not its underlying motives. They can understand the ‘how’ but not the ‘why’. Orwell, Arendt, and Zamyatin all try to find the answer to this ‘why’ by looking at the society through the lens of totalitarianism. […]
George Orwell explores in his writings if truth and reality are merely a social construct, often challenged and weaponized in a totalitarian society. […]
In “Brave New World”, the insider Bernard Marx and the outsider John the Savage consider if social stability should be at the cost of intangibles like art and freedom. […]
The forms of chemical and sexual control that are depicted in “Brave New World” are a reflection of the concerns of the world as it was—and still is—with respect to drugs. […]
“Brave New World” is deeply concerned with the impact of advances like genetic engineering and operant conditioning on our social structures and our individual identities. […]
The link between love and revolution is very clearly laid out in ‘We’, and it’s a link that’s regularly developed in utopian as well as dystopian writing. […]
Art, creativity, freedom—all have been carefully thought through in the terrifying dystopia of the One State, yet the citizen D-503 is confident that his society is on the right side of all these issues. […]
Could utopia and dystopia represent two different strains of the utopian impulse, one pleasant and one unpleasant? Perhaps utopia appeals to the intellect, while we react to a dystopia more viscerally. […]
H.G. Wells thought the problem with most utopias was that they were too static—i.e. boring—so he made the Modern Utopia a kinetic place. […]
The Time Traveler’s hypotheses in “The Time Machine” are a metacritical commentary on the development of utopian literature. […]
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