Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And […]
Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Nineteen Eighty-Four
More than any other dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four concentrates on its hero’s psychological state and his efforts to reveal the truth of the superstate in which he lives. Orwell’s meticulous attention to the engineering […]
Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Fahrenheit 451
In 1950, when Fahrenheit 451 first appeared as “The Fireman” in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, television was fast becoming a ubiquitous feature of the American home. The big three commercial television networks (NBC, ABC, […]
Dystopia - Literature - Philippic
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The Dystopia Files: Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel Bend Sinister doesn’t focus on class war, a projected future or the awakening of an individual under authoritarian rule. It follows an exceptional man’s loss of all that makes his life […]
Culture - Dystopia - Literature - Philippic - Politics
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The Dystopia Files: It Can’t Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]
Culture - Dystopia - Literature - Philippic - Politics
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The Dystopia Files: When the Sleeper Wakes
H.G. Wells originally published When the Sleeper Awakes in 1898 as a serial in The Graphic, an illustrated London newspaper. In his preface to the 1910 edition, The Sleeper Awakes, he expressed disappointment with the […]
Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: The Iron Heel
Jack London’s political dystopia, The Iron Heel, published in 1905, is not so fantastic as it is relevant, not so prophetic as it is cogent. The question the novel leaves you with, in this age […]
Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: We
Yergeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We is not the first dystopian novel. There was The Iron Heel (1905) by Jack London and The Sleeper Awakes (1910) by H.G Wells, Russian translations of which Zamyatin edited. It […]
Consumerism - Culture - Drugs - Dystopia
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Stoned in the USA
On September 30, 2008 the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer aired an essay by Richard Rodriguez titled “Mexico’s Violent Drug War Wreaks Havoc on Innocent Lives,” in which Rodriguez characterized the relationship between foreign trafficking […]
Consumerism - Culture - Dystopia - Technology
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Telephonic Purgatory
It should have been quick and simple, establishing a telephone account for a new place of residence. As Verizon was my existing provider, I saw no reason to take the business elsewhere. So I navigated […]