Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1309

There is, of course, nothing new about dystopias, for they belong to a literary tradition which, including also the closely related satiric utopias, stretches from at least as far back as the eighteenth century and Swift's Gulliver's Travels to the twentieth century and Zamiatin's We, Capek's War With The Newts, Huxley's Brave New World, E. M. Forster's `` The Machine Stops '', C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and which in science fiction is represented before the present deluge as early as Wells's trilogy, The Time Machine, `` A Story Of The Days To Come '', and When The Sleeper Wakes, and as recently as Jack Williamson's `` With Folded Hands '' ( 1947 ), the classic story of men replaced by their own robots.

What makes the current phenomenon unique is that so many science-fiction writers have reversed a trend and turned to writing works critical of the impact of science and technology on human life.

Since the great flood of these dystopias has appeared only in the last twelve years, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the chief impetus was the 1949 publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, an assumption which is supported by the frequent echoes of such details as Room 101, along with education by conditioning from Brave New World, a book to which science-fiction writers may well have returned with new interest after reading the more powerful Orwell dystopia.