The dystopian genre has had a surge of popularity in television and movies the past few years with movies such as the Hunger Games and series such as Netflix’s Black Mirror. However, the genre’s...Show moreThe dystopian genre has had a surge of popularity in television and movies the past few years with movies such as the Hunger Games and series such as Netflix’s Black Mirror. However, the genre’s popularity had its beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, in particular, thanks to the contributions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Their books, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), are to this day lauded for their prophetic elements. On the one hand, Brave New World explores scientific progress and the negative consequences it could entail. Some of the inventions present in the novel were not yet invented at the time that Huxley wrote them, such as for example birth control for women. On the other hand, Orwell’s exploration of cruelty by totalitarian regimes and the high-tech espionage of their citizens through cameras in Nineteen Eighty Four, well before the Soviet Union’s KGB and the East-German Stasi applied them during the Cold War, prophesied the rise of surveillance technologies in modern technocracies. These two foundational dystopian novels have their origins in the two authors’ critique of optimistic utopian narratives. The works of H.G. Wells, in particular, were viewed adversely by Huxley and Orwell. Despite the negative incentive, there are clear similarities between the novels of these three public intellectuals. H.G. Wells had a ground-breaking approach to communicating his ideas about science and society to a wider audience. In his scientific romances he combined aspects of the social novel with scientific theories about the progress of human civilization in order to express his vision of how to rid the world of its ills, which ultimately inspired, on the one hand, the scientific explorations of utopia in Brave New World and, on the other hand, the social protest against dystopian developments in Western society that Nineteen Eighty-four was to become. These would ultimately become two distinct kinds of dystopian literature: Huxley’s science-fiction dystopias and Orwell’s social dystopias. There are of course also combinations of both. The close readings of H.G. Wells’ Perez 4 Men Like Gods (1923), Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four will highlight the similarities between the three novels in terms of their treatment of the utopia/dystopia dichotomy and will show that the authors’ personal backgrounds played an important role in determining each different approach to the building of a utopia/dystopia in the respective novels.Show less
