RETREAT OF THE SERIOUS READER -- PART TWO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 5, 2021
THE TIME MACHINE (1895)
“The Time Machine” (1895) finds H. G. Wells as a time traveler in the Victorian Age discovering the Earth in the future has become a utopia. The only problem about this future world is the time traveler’s device disappears and he is unable to return to his world, but must dig deep into ominous tunnels in a desperate attempt to return to his own time. The idea: beware of acquiring the gifts you wish for. Wells questions idealists who look for a perfect world, a world without pain and suffering, therefore a world without surprise, a world without disappointment, therefore no happiness, a world of constant thriving for perfection with class divide going full circle.
THE MACHINE STOPS (1909)
“The Machine Stops” was written by E. M. Forster in 1909. It is a sci-fi novel that predicted the rise of our dependency on what has become the Internet. The omnipotent “Machine” of the novel provides a society driven underground with all its needs. It even has instant messengers. It predicted our obsession with technology and our willingness to give our time, attention, and minds to the inane.
METAMORPHOSIS (1915)
In Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (1915), unsatisfied salesman Gregor wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant cockroach that cannot speak. As his family struggles to accept his new form, their horror turns into a terrible indifference. I read this in high school with its toxic themes of isolation and identity staying with me, as has “The Trial” (1925) and “The Castle” (1926). The first finds Josef K arrested one day and he has done nothing wrong; the second is a haunting tale of K’s relentless struggle to reach the Castle where he seeks employment. With both novels, you can reflect on the injustices and frustrations of your own life.
WE (1924)
Yevgeny Zamyatin's “We” novel influenced every perspicacious prescient novelist that would follow including George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eight-Four” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Yevgeny, a dystopian novelist imagines what led to man, once conquered, came to be subsumed under totalitarian “harmony.” That is until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers discovers he has a soul. Like all citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police or The Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned by One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. “You’re in a bad way!” D-503 enlightens her, “You have developed a soul.” O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, who reads his verse at public executions.
BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)
Aldous Huxley vehemently denied the influence of Zamyatin in writing this novel, considered by many the best dystopian novel that was ever written. Among other things, Huxley anticipated stem cell research. Like Zamyatin, people are designated Alpha, Beta, Gamma, but not Delta, which applied to the intelligence-based social hierarchy. World controllers here have created a utopian society where everyone is "happy," as long as they take their happiness drugs, reminding up the psychedelic drugs of the "terrible 1960s." The hero is psychologist Bernard who alone is unhappy, feeling discontent, and longing to be free as he experiences reality. Brave New World warns of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries, the Bokanovsky Process, and hypnopaedic conditioning.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE! (1935)
I first read this book when I was a boy during WWII. Adolf Hitler had come to power in 1933 and had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Author Sinclair Lewis anticipated the spread of Nazism and totalitarianism and attempted to alert the American public to the danger of this happening to our own country. Lewis chooses to have an anti-immigrant demagogue wins the US presidency.
The novel was written in the wake of Mussolini and Hitler’s terrifying sweep of Europe before the actual Poland invasion. While President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected for the third time in November 1940 ensuring America’s neutrality, Nazis were ransacking Europe was blizkreiging bombing London. Everything changed on December 7, 1941, when the Empire of Japan’s navy and air force attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing nearly 3,000 American sailors and soldiers of the US Seventh Fleet and
ANTHEM (1938)
The Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand tells the story explores a world where individualism is banned with everyone working as collectives. Each person is assigned a place and space by The Council of Vocations. Our hero has a number, Equality 7-2521 who knows he is different and attempts to find his own vocation and falls in love. The story is highlighted with the message that we need to claim our own identity, individualism, and personal freedom by taking charge and fighting for our equality. No matter what inequality faces a person, there is no profit attempt to find equality in group norms, in the rhetoric of propaganda, in societal guarantees of security. It can only be found by going against the grain and breaking free of artificial constraints.
ANIMAL FARM (1944)
George Orwell in this epic fable shows how a revolution of the best intentions, such as the Communist Revolution of 1917 failed to follow the idealistic path that was anticipated. Orwell had experienced the same thing in the Spanish Civil War of the 1920s. He has the animals of the Manor Farm revolt to drive out the humans. The animals’ newfound autonomy is short-lived as a new form of autocracy and tyranny soon replace this. It soon became apparent that once all the animals were found equal some animals were clearly more equal than others, thus the drive for equality is an impossible proposition save for the freedom of opportunity. In the present divisive climate, we see this lesson Orwell shared with us 77 years ago has still not been learned.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949)
Once Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States in 2016, publishers came out with new editions of NINETEEN EIGHTY- FOUR and IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, making his attempt to govern responsibly nearly impossible. The American republic, especially the left was hungry for power after being surprised by this election. They fueled the 21st Century racial, social, and economic tensions that had plagued America since Reconstruction after the Civil War. Conveniently, President Trump with his consuming immaturity and cloying narcissism fell into their hands. Now, President Joseph Biden is celebrating his administration as he governs with cliché such as “I feel your pain.” Meanwhile, The Bill of Rights, American Constitutions, and the Federalist Papers have been set aside. Norm Dorn correctly muses: We may see a collision of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and ATLAS SHRUGGED. Signs of both are evident.
George Orwell’s story takes place in 1984 with Winston living in a world ruled by state interference where even intimate thoughts are a crime. I have written often about this book but have not been seduced by its simplistic justifications. Alas, I see the reverse where States’ Rights are now being compromised with the central government ratcheting up the controls “for our own good,” dictating what individual citizens need without their participation in the process while the media echoes these political sentiments from the Internet managing as puppet masters from the wings advancing the president’s agenda.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962)
This dystopian satirical black novel is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, who narrates the novel, records his violent exploits and his reaction when state authorities intent on reforming him by having him watch extremely violent films vis-à-vis B. F. Skinner’s behavior modification – only to paradoxically produce the opposite result.
Anthony Burgess wrote it after he returned to Great Britain after an absence of some years to see much had changed. A youth culture had grown up in his absence – this was 1960 – where young people skipped school, hung out in coffee shops, were obsessed with pop music, and formed teenage gangs.
England was in the grips of fear, feeling helpless in how to handle the raging hormones of juvenile delinquents who were ubiquitously pockmarked across the country. The top tier of British society had splintered into internecine political polarity and warfare. Meanwhile, once sacred symbols of culture such as family, church, school, and the workplace had lost their influence and were abandoned; while public places, monuments and statues were being desecrated. Society was fractured while attempts to restore it to its former integrity through juvenile counseling, psychotherapy, and psychological behavioral reprogramming had instead driven society to the door of systemic collapse.
The inspiration for Burgess’s novel was the beating his first wife had endured at the hands of a gang of young drunken American servicemen stationed in England during World War Two. His wife subsequently suffered a miscarriage. The horror of that experience became the landscape of this novel.
Plagued with the intuitive memory of this tragedy, Burgess investigated matters of free will and studied with some skepticism the then-popular ideas advocated by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner on behavior modification.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969)
Slaughterhouse-Five is a science fiction infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. that follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, a fabled city with a rich cultural and architectural history which had no strategic relevance to the war. The experience which Vonnegut himself lived through as an American serviceman stayed with him throughout his life. This work has been called an example of “unmatched moral clarity” and “one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time.”
Slaughterhouse-Five is written through Billy Pilgrim's life experiences. The story is told through pre and post-war events. Billy can travel in time. Through this ability, the audience was able to get various scenes of Billy's life. The story however has no chronological order. Billy witness horror in the war. As a result, he begins to question the meaning of life. In the end, Billy comes to terms with his past. He realizes that life is simply out of control. As humans, we cannot control the past, present, or future. The story concludes with the same bird song. Perhaps it is suggesting that life is a meaningless and vicious cycle. Kurt Vonnegut uses science fiction to demonstrate what lies outside of human consciousness.
THE HANDMAID’S TALE (1985)
This is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Marget Atwood. It is set in a near-future New England, in a strongly patriarchal, totalitarian theocratic state, known as Gilead that has overthrown the United States government. The central character and narrator is a woman named Offred, one of the groups known as "handmaids", who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "commanders" – the ruling class of men.
The novel explores themes of subjugated women in a patriarchal society and the various means by which they resist and attempt to gain individuality and independence. The novel's title echoes parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories (such as "The Merchant's Tale" and "The Parson's Tale").
The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula War, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. The book has been adapted into a 1990 film, a 2000 opera, and a 2017 television series.
FATHERLAND (1992)
Similar to “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), author Robert Harris asked, “What would it be like if Hitler had won the Second World War?” Harris paints a gripping picture in FATHERLAND, set in the “terrible 1960s” long after the Nazis have won the war. Conspiracies are everywhere that could unravel Hitler’s triumph and redefined history. Twenty years after Nazi Germany’s victory and a grand celebration is planned for the Fuhrer’s seventy-fifth birthday. This coincides with the imminent peacemaking visit of President John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, Berlin Detective Xavier March is called on to make a routine investigation of a corpse washed up on the shores of a lake which turns out to be the body of a high-ranking Gestapo commander. What he uncovers is a terrifying and long-concealed conspiracy that is doomed to spell the end of The Third Reich. The novel subverts some of the conventions of the detective novel. It begins with a murder and diligent police detective investigating and eventually solving it. However, since the murderer is highly placed in a tyrannical regime, solving the mystery does not result in the detective pursuing and arresting the murderer. The contrary occurs in the novel: the murderer pursuing and arresting the detective. The novel was an immediate best-seller in the UK and has sold over three million copies and been translated into 25 languages. Throughout the novel, Harris gradually explains, in a fictional backstory, the developments that allowed Germany to prevail in World War II. The author explains in the Author's notes that except for the backstories of the fictitious characters, the narrative describes reality up to 1942, after which it is fictional.
NEW CENTURY DYSTOPIAN FARE LACKS THE “CUTTING EDGE”
Perhaps it is that since METAMORPHOSIS (1915) and WE (1924) that the world is gotten too used to anarchy, totalitarianism, communism, socialism, inequality, conspiracy, brutality, barbarism, nihilism, discrimination, duplicity, chicanery, and being overcrowded that authors don’t feel they have an audience for the imaginative products of the authors listed here. There are too many distractions too many “off-ramps” to creative thinking. Treachery and deception, murder and mayhem, exploitation, and insurrection have become the new norm. Politicians say, “they feel our pain,” that they are for “all of us” and yet we know when push comes to shove, when they promise us everything including the kitchen sink, that when everything implodes, it is the “WE” of Yevgeny Zamyatin that are likely to suffer. That is the serious consequences of the retreat of the courageous writers and the alert and knowing reader.
Consider NOUGHTS & CROSSES (2001) by Malorie Blackman. She depicts an alternative 21st Century Great Britain beset by racial tension and eruptions of violence. This has become so common to be “oh hum.” THE WOOL TRILOGY by Hugh Howey (2014) for fans of “The Hunger Games,” in other words, an escape from reality. Then there is a bevy of 2018 dystopian novels of which these are representative: THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh where a family flees to an island to escape a mysterious sickness attached to men. CHINA DREAM where totalitarianism invades the lecherous Ma Diode’s sleep. EVE OF MAN by Giovanna & Tom Fletcher is about the mysterious decline of female births, a girl is born after fifty years of none, and is called “Eve.” We have become the equivalent of the “puppet on a string.”
