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In 1948, George Orwell put into words a nightmare vision of the future. Reversing the digits of the year, he called his novel 1984. He thus endowed the present year with a special significance. 1984, in quotes and spoken with a particular inflection, has become a time for us to pause and reflect, to judge how correctly Orwell saw the implications of both his present and ours.
Orwell's book criticized an existing society, but his method of criticism was not direct. He chose instead to respond to the universal tendency of imperfect humankind to construct, out of their hopes and dreams, perfect societies — the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, the Republic of Plato. In 1984, Orwell constructed a negative utopia that, along with Zamyatin's (1983) We and the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley (1969), gave name to a new literary genre, the “dystopia.” Dystopias are fanciful pictures of societies in which efforts to achieve some model of perfection have failed; but instead of the failure being acknowledged, efforts have persisted and become perverted. The dystopic novels mount attacks on the utopian ideal by a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or, more accurately, a reductio ad horrendum. Dystopias are utopias that have curdled and gone sour.
The conflict between utopians and anti-utopians or dystopians, is deeply rooted in the human spirit; it is a manifestation of the division between man's longing, believing and dependent needs and their counterparts in doubt, skepticism and irony. It is this derivation, even if negative, from universal human aspirations that renders dystopias both poignant and distinctive. For, it must be remembered that, as bleak as the societies are that they depict, dystopias represent corruptions and perversions of lofty hopes for the benefit of all mankind. In this respect they differ fundamentally