The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president’s repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but, rather, “alternative facts.” As any reader of “1984” knows, this is exactly Big Brother’s standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are. All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of Orwell in the news, and “1984” began shooting up the Amazon best-seller list. Or it did until Donald Trump was inaugurated. And yet his novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now, especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment, than does Orwell’s more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North Korea. Wells, whose writing he detested, and it remained a book that means to be as playful as it is prophetic. He began “Brave New World” as a parody of H.G. Huxley was not entirely serious about this. (The book is a little unclear on this point, but in “Brave New World” the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to call her “pneumatic.”) Huxley, on the other hand, writing almost two decades earlier than Orwell (his former Eton pupil, as it happened), foresaw a world that included space travel private helicopters genetically engineered test tube babies enhanced birth control an immensely popular drug that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy hormone-laced chewing gum that seems to work the way Viagra does a full sensory entertainment system that outdoes IMAX and maybe even breast implants. The main technological advancement there is the two-way telescreen, essentially an electronic peephole. His imagined London is merely a drabber, more joyless version of the city, still recovering from the Blitz, where he was living in the mid-1940s, just before beginning the novel.
Orwell didn’t really have much feel for the future, which to his mind was just another version of the present. TWO months ago I would have said that not only is “Brave New World” a livelier, more entertaining book than “1984,” it’s also a more prescient one. Charles McGrath The totalitarian rulers in Huxley’s book give their citizens exactly what they think they want.
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