Dark mirrors
Orwell wasn’t alone in taking inspiration from
history for his writing. Matt Elton explores five
more classic dystopian novels drawing on fact
The history behind 1984
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Or well believed that fellow English
author Aldous Huxley had derived
inspiration for his 1932 novel Brave
New World from We, a claim that
Huxley denied. He instead argued
that he aimed to parody the utopian
works of authors such as HG Wells,
countering their optimism with a
nightmarish vision of the future.
Brave New World is laced with
medical anxieties: citizens of Huxley’s
dystopia are engineered in artificial
wombs and kept politically docile via
a mix of mind-altering drugs and
distractions such as the ‘feelies’,
cinemas in which sensations of the
films’ characters are transmitted to
the viewer. Within its fictional World
State, the real-life US industrialist
Henry Ford is revered for his focus onmass production and homogeneity,
and scientific ideas are useful only
if they contribute to the continued
stability of the government. The
novel’s protagonist challenges the
status quo in this apparent utopia:
predictably, it doesn’t end happily.We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin
became involved in politics at an
early age, joining the Bolsheviks in
his twenties. Although he initially
supported the revolutions that
forged the Soviet Union, he grew
increasingly critical of the Commu-
nist Party, particularly its use of
censorship. That censorship made
his literary career difficult and
inspired his most famous work, We- finished in 1921 and first published
in English in a 1924 New York edition.
Zamyatin’s warning against total-
itarianism is set 1,000 years after the
One State has conquered the world.
His protagonist is D-503, an engineer
living in a society ruled by a dictator
and built, panoptican-like, almost
entirely of glass. Several of the con-
cerns and concepts that would later
appear in Orwell’s 1949 novel are
also present here, including the
dehumanising power of politics and
a lead character who learns to love
the state after being psychologically
tortured. Indeed, Orwell reviewed We
in 1946, arguing that “it is astonishing
that no English publisher has been
enterprising enough to reissue it”.
It was first published in Zamyatin’s
home country as recently as 1988.GETTY^ IMAGES