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 [...]
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, [...]
Arguably the first twentieth-century dystopian, Robert Hugh Benson authored “Lord of the World,” a prophetic vision of a ravaged world run by an unholy alliance of Free Masons and Communists. The first great dystopian writers of the twentieth century came from upstanding British families. Arguably the first twentieth-century dystopian, Robert Hugh Benson was the third [...]
A culture cannot survive without a religion, at least not for long. A culture derives from the cultus, the group of people, usually based on kinship ties, who banded together to worship the same deity or deities. Once a common worship and understanding of theology develop, a culture developed from it. From the culture, then [...]
Preface For almost as long as I have had the privilege of reading, I have read dystopian literature. I started with Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, but I soon rather quickly devoured Brave New World, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as many of the works of Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur [...]
Sounding like a modern, the Greek writer Callimachus once penned an epigram where he quipped, “a large book is a great misfortune.” Does not the legitimacy of such an assertion depend on the author and the reader? Novelist Michael O’Brien gives all lovers of fine novels another marvelously large book. As one who enjoys good [...]
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilization’s decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age. [...]