Most people have at least a passing familiarity with George Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984. In it, Orwell presents a vision of a future (when he wrote it, the year 1984 was 36 years into his future) in which individual liberties have been suppressed by a totalitarian regime that allowed no individuality or dissent.  In 1984, the insidious Big Brother watched all, ruled all, and controlled all.

There is a slightly older, somewhat lesser known book by the author Aldous Huxley with a similar theme yet contrasting view.  In his brilliant novel Brave New World, Huxley saw a future in which individual liberties were given up freely in exchange for the government’s largess.  Individuality and dissent were not outlawed, they were willingly abandoned by a populace too focused on their own pleasures to worry about the future consequences of their actions.

In 1931, when he wrote the novel, Huxley set the events of Brave New World five hundred years into the future.  Twenty years after the novel was published, Huxley said that things were deteriorating so rapidly that, if given the chance to do it over, he would have set the time of the book at “no more than two hundred” years away.   I can’t help but wonder what timetable Mr. Huxley would affix to his future vision if he were alive to see the state of the world today.

Without giving away anything of the plot of either work, I’d suggest picking up both 1984 and Brave New World and reading them successively, or even concurrently.  You don’t need to be a political science major to see that elements of each are rapidly working their way into real life.  You simply cannot read 1984 without eyeing the traffic cameras suspiciously.  You can’t take in Brave New World without making parallels to the debates over stem cell research or national health care that are currently raging here in the US.

Neither work was intended to be an oracle of the future.  These are works of fiction, and excellent ones at that.  But there is an element of truth in there that cannot be denied.

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