The Dystopian Imagination

Wednesday, February 26th, 2003

The Dystopian Imagination, by Theodore Dalrymple, covers a literary genre near and dear to any libertarian sci-fi fan’s heart:

It is hardly surprising that a century of utopian dreams and coercive social engineering to achieve them should have been a century rich in imaginative dystopias. Indeed, from The Time Machine to Blade Runner, the dystopia became a distinct literary and cinematic genre, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 became so much a part of Western man’s mental furniture that even unliterary people invoke them to criticize the present.

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