blissblogger
Well-known member
By which I mean, not dystopias as imagined by socialists (there are plenty of these - The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, imagines a near-future dominated by advertising agencies and megacorporations, overpopulated and resource-depleted... Pohl and Kornbluth belonged to a cabal of American s.f. writers called the Futurians many of whom were Communists.... They also wrote Gladiator-At-Law, which is similarly anti-capitalist) (the film Rollerball also springs to mind - workers salute the corporation anthem each morning, peons gawp at bloody gladiatorial spectacles)
No, I mean dystopias imagined by conservatives of a State-dominated, workerist future.
These include
Evelyn Waugh - Love Among the Ruins - "a satire set in a dystopian, quasi-egalitarian" future Britain - clearly inspired by Attlee's government and the Welfare State, although by the time it was published Churchill had been reelected)
Anthony Burgess - 1985 (written mid-70s, imagines a trade union dominated U.K.)
1990 (a TV series of late 70s, which imagines a state-controlled leftist U.K. in which the problem is not illegal immigration but illegal emigration - doctors etc smuggling themselves to USA where they can get paid five times the pittance they get paid by N.H.S.)
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (not as overt as 1985 but grim flatblocks, streets overrun by youth gangs, and Soviet influence on pop culture and slang)
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We. (He had been a Bolshevik and then became quickly one of the first Soviet dissidents - this imagining of a police state and total survelliance society was banned by the Soviet government)
Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide and Seek (a former Communist, left the Party because of Hungary, quickly became a right wing curmudgeon - this book imagines U.K a century into the future after its conquest by the U.S.S.R.)
Can anyone think of other examples?
No, I mean dystopias imagined by conservatives of a State-dominated, workerist future.
These include
Evelyn Waugh - Love Among the Ruins - "a satire set in a dystopian, quasi-egalitarian" future Britain - clearly inspired by Attlee's government and the Welfare State, although by the time it was published Churchill had been reelected)
Anthony Burgess - 1985 (written mid-70s, imagines a trade union dominated U.K.)
1990 (a TV series of late 70s, which imagines a state-controlled leftist U.K. in which the problem is not illegal immigration but illegal emigration - doctors etc smuggling themselves to USA where they can get paid five times the pittance they get paid by N.H.S.)
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (not as overt as 1985 but grim flatblocks, streets overrun by youth gangs, and Soviet influence on pop culture and slang)
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We. (He had been a Bolshevik and then became quickly one of the first Soviet dissidents - this imagining of a police state and total survelliance society was banned by the Soviet government)
Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide and Seek (a former Communist, left the Party because of Hungary, quickly became a right wing curmudgeon - this book imagines U.K a century into the future after its conquest by the U.S.S.R.)
Can anyone think of other examples?
