Word: dystopia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Orwell holds the world record for scaring us away from a future that seemed perfectly plausible. People like to claim that Orwell "got it wrong," as if it were Orwell's fault that we don't dwell in some ghastly dystopia. His 1984 (published in 1949) is the bitter work of a dying man. Granted, political correctness and language theory haven't become Newspeak just yet. But Orwell's portrait of a debased Britain, singing machine-made pop songs and obsessed with vast public lotteries, has a certain uneasy resonance even...
...have here the dystopia of youth run wild, of children armed only with remote controls ruling the world. It is hard to tell whether this is a real fear of Hicks' or simply a nagging sour feeling from spending too many hours yelling at spoiled teenagers from the suburbs. Still, this is a common enough concern. Robert Bly, for one, has written of the dangers of living in a world without active rites of passage. According to such thinkers, we live in a world of manchildren, of overgrown high-chair tyrants...
This is the intriguing alternate world that Robert Harris created in his 1992 best seller, Fatherland. His dystopia is the setting for a tense political thriller. When several longtime Nazi officials turn up dead, the investigation begins to unravel a horrifying secret: the "resettlement" of the Jews during the war was just the cover story for another horrifying crime...
...both are further hemmed in by their commitment to guerrilla leaders who really did help to free their people from foreign domination. Yet beneath those surface similarities, North Korea and Cuba are as different as Doctor Strangelove and Doctor Zhivago, as different as a made-to-order Stalinist dystopia where not a thought is out of place and an unruly Caribbean island that is the stuff of Marx's nightmares. In North Korea the government tells every citizen what to wear every day; in Cuba even soldiers help streetwalkers hustle foreign clothes...
...desire to present a panoramic vision of life in what everyone is now pleased to think of as the heart of American darkness. Los Angeles, the city that has in a wink of history's eye ceased to be Everyman's Great Utopia, has become instead everyone's Great Dystopia...