Winston Elliott III & Brad Birzer For those of you who do not know, Winston Elliott is the mastermind behind this whole venture, The Imaginative Conservative. I first met Winston twenty summers ago—at a conference he sponsored in Houston, summer 1995. I was still in graduate school at the time, living in Bloomington, Indiana. [...]
In 1958, at a Dutch bash held in his honor, J.R.R. Tolkien told his audience: I look East, West, North, South, and I do not see Sauron. But I see that Saruman has many descendants. We Hobbits have against them no magic weapons. Yet, my gentle hobbits, I give you this toast: To the Hobbits. [...]
I suppose we all have guilty pleasures. One of mine is reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. I can sit down, day or night, with any one of his works and be a rather—at least intellectually, if not spiritually—happy man. Yes, I know he was somewhat crazy, descending into a greater and greater madness until [...]
Over the past fifteen years, an immense number of books dealing with J.R.R. Tolkien have appeared on the bookshelves. No doubt Peter Jackson’s movies has provided some rather mighty advertising for the former Oxford don. Sadly, however, many recent authors who have written about Tolkien frequently fall into one of two camps: those who write about [...]
This short series on dystopian literature has been a guide and little more. A longer analysis would do justice to a number of authors who deserve to be studied. The great Kurt Vonnegut offered the darkest of satire when exploring governments gone terribly wrong in Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), and [...]
Of contemporary thinkers, no one engages the essence of dystopia more than the Canadian author and professor, Margaret Atwood. She is, unquestionably, one of the most important women of letters, offering social and cultural criticisms in the vein of George Orwell and Russell Kirk. As with Orwell and Kirk, Atwood does not easily fit into a category. [...]
An American original, Ray Bradbury, will enjoy a high reputation for centuries to come. The future will remember him for hundreds of short stories and at least four profound novels: Fahrenheit 451; The Martian Chronicles; Something Wicked this Way Comes; and Dandelion Wine. Though Bradbury never set out intentionally to discuss dystopia or utopia, each [...]
Though gorgeously written in its own right, 1984 also benefitted from the timing of its release, at the very end of the Second World War and at the beginning of the Cold War. Though a delusional love affair existed between the West and the Soviet Union in 1943, disillusionment and reality set in in the few [...]
One movie that has intrigued more than any other is “The Birds.” By “intrigued,” I mean that I find watching it a true intellectual challenge, a puzzle to be solved, rather than a work of art to enjoy. “I am neither poor nor innocent”—Melanie Daniels, protagonist of Hitchcock’s The Birds Cinema as Art From the [...]
Most who remember C.S. “Jack” Lewis (1898-1963) remember him as the author of the seven Narnia books as well as a host of works of Christian apologetics, such as The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Great Divorce (1945), and Mere Christianity (1952). Few, however, remember his science-fiction trilogy, his vast literary criticism, or his somewhat archaic [...]
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” is ultimately an allegory for the modern world: Clean, shiny, polished, and deadly. I am not exaggerating when I claim this movie to be one of the greatest works of art ever to emerge out of Hollywood. Each person has “the right to live, to work, and to think as an individual, [...]
Despite his blistering attacks on all forms of socialism in his fiction, many scholars have considered George Orwell a socialist. Yet his leftism was merely “by accident,” a reaction against the commercialism and crassness of the Western world of his day. Unlike the first two British dystopian writers, George Orwell was a colonial, born in [...]
When the forces of American progressivism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, those who would one day be labeled as conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians found themselves quite ill-prepared for the intellectual and political onslaught. Perhaps the best analyst at the time progressivism emerged, somewhat surprisingly, was E.L. Godkin, the venerable founder of The Nation. [...]
The other brilliant dystopian of this early period, Aldous Huxley, also came from a prominent British family. The great grandson of T.H. Huxley on his father’s side and the grand nephew of Matthew Arnold on his mother’s side, Aldous Huxley came from a family of distinguished thinkers in the arts and the sciences. Huxley’s masterpiece, [...]