By Niall Ferguson (Original source The Times)
“So which dystopia are we living in? Most educated people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. So influential have these books been that we are inclined to view all disconcerting new phenomena as either “Orwellian” or “Huxleyan”. If you suspect we shall lose our freedom to a brutally repressive state, grinding its boot into our faces, you think of George. If you think we shall lose it to a hedonistic consumer culture, complete with test-tube designer babies, you quote Aldous.
However, a superior work of science fiction to both is the earlier masterpiece We, by the Russian satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin. Written in 1920-21, in the early, turbulent years of Bolshevik rule, We is astoundingly prescient. In the “One State”, individual humans are mere “ciphers” clad in standardised “unifs”, with numbers instead of names. All apartments are made entirely of glass and curtains can be drawn only when one is having state-licensed sex.”
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