Theodore Dalrymple reviews the 20thC dystopias and their comparisons to reality 25 years ago in City Journal. I remembered the essay, though forgetting it was his. I mentally added a few other dystopias to the discussion, including That Hideous Strength. Rob Henderson linked to this, for which I am grateful.
The totalitarian world Orwell describes in 1984 is thankfully today more a historical curiosity than a serious threat, except in an Islamist version. Yet, many of Orwell's ideas, like those of Huxley, remain pertinent, even though the threat of Stalinism has passed, for Orwell warned us about undesirable trends that arose from the condition of modernity as much as from Stalinism. His fears arose not just from his intuitive grasp of Stalinist states and his knowledge of communist conduct during the Spanish Civil War but from his experiences with the BBC's bureaucracy during World War II, where he witnessed firsthand the potential of the modern mass media to mislead and manipulate.
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