The power of Huxley's vision, therefore, was the notion that seemingly free-acting individuals could enslave themselves to their own desires. Huxley was far more attuned to the internal dynamics of Western culture, Stephens says.Īldous Huxley envisaged a 'negative utopia'. His celebrated novel Brave New World is a parable about the 'dehumanisation of human beings'.Ī world, Huxley said, where 'man has been subordinated to his own inventions - science, technology, social organisation'. Writing more than a decade-and-a-half before the publication of 1984, Aldous Huxley envisioned a very different 'negative utopia'. 'The threat within 1984 is a threat that's entirely external to human society - it's the overweening censorious totalitarian state that tells you what to think, that tells you what to believe, that manufactures the economy of information,' ABC religion and ethics broadcaster Scott Stephens says.īut what Orwell failed to foresee, says Stephens, was the rise of consumerist capitalism and its far subtler means of mass enslavement.

Writing at the beginning of the Cold War, Orwell accurately cast forward to describe the tactics and reality-bending excesses of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China. In fact, there are other highly speculative classics that better fit our social and political times. But he wasn't the only 20th-century writer of prescient dystopian fiction.

Do we live in a brave new world