There’s no point denying it, the world has gone stark, raving bonkers right now. I feel like in the UK we are used to slow news days, when they repeat the same segments about car accidents and court cases over and over again throughout morning, noon and night. But if you were to check in with the news channels every few hours on a day like today, you’d get a barrage of updates on the craziness sweeping our society.
So, how do we cope?
We turn to literature, of course, like we’ve always done. Sales in dystopian fiction – that which imagines an alternative, undesirable society plagued politically, culturally, and/or environmentally – have skyrocketed over the past few weeks, and we all know the reason why. However, what makes these chart-climbing novels so scary is their reflection on the actual state of our present-day world, and their striking parallels with what we can identify as the beginnings of a nightmarish reality. Here are five dystopian books experiencing a (re)surge in popularity at the minute:
1984, George Orwell
It’s no secret that Orwell can be frigheningly accurate, and the desire to find out how accurate he really is has meant 1984 has remained number one on the Amazon Best Sellers list for over a week now. As The Huffington Post reports, it was probably due to this interview in which Kellyanne Conway (one of Trump’s senior advisers) used the term “alternative facts” when quizzed about accusations of falsehoods from Trump’s press team, echoing the Orwellian phrase “doublethink”. Twisting the truth in favour of the government is a key aspect to totalitarian regimes, setting up scary associations between Orwell’s Oceania/Airstrip One and the political situation in the USA right now.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Soon to be aired on TV later this year (check out the first trailer here), the invasive and all-inclusive state control of women’s bodies in Atwood’s most well known novel is scarily reminiscent of Trump’s abortion policy. The well nicknamed “global gag law” reminds us directly of the extreme methods of censorship and control in Atwood’s Gilead, the flashbacks of its narrator Offred reminding us that revolution occurs slowly and then all at once, whilst the zealous religious justification behind the book’s militarised theocratic regime stands as a stark warning of what can happen when misled hatred and power take over.
The Circle, David Eggers
A bit of a satire on the explosion of Silicon Valley culture, companies like Apple and social media platforms such as Facebook, this novel envisions a not-too-distant future in which we share every facet of our lives with each other online, to the extent that personal cameras can livestream everything we do. The company promoting such opacity, “The Circle”, requires all employees to post and participate online virtually every minute of the day, as well as competing against each other for rankings depending on the strength of their online presence. What starts out as a subtly comedic parody or satire slowly becomes sinister when you realise there are punishments for a lack of participation, and that there can be deadly consequences to complete transparency. Eggers takes his source material from the rise of social media in the past ten years, and the oligopoly of companies that have the potential to tip over in to totalitarianism. Check out the trailer for the upcoming film – starring Emma Watsom and Tom Hanks – here.
Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Bradbury presents a world in which books are burned to eliminate the spreading of ideas and values other than those authorised by the state, a ‘precuation’ against radicalism and dissent. It is censorship taken to the extreme, and rips apart communities and relationships because people are encouraged to spy and report on each other. Bradbury attributes the decline of books to the growth of technology, referring to the invention of the TV at the time he was writing, and so the government disguise their intentions by explaining books are simply no longer needed. Whilst we are yet to see a widespread revival and enforcement of book burning, the act of deleting public information invokes similarities with the disappearing pages from the official White House website after Trump was sworn in as president.
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
You’ve probably heard of this one because of the hugely successful TV series available on Amazon Prime. It takes the scary question of “what if the Nazi’s had won the war?” and bulks it out with a consideration of what life would have been like in an America divided between German and Japanese control. Reminiscent again of Conway’s “alternative facts”, it constructs an entire alternative history. The underground resistance movement and the high stakes at play are really fascinating, so it’s well worth a read – especially in a time when all of our speculative “what if” questions that we never thought would happen seem to be giving us some scary answers in reality.