To then extrapolate to what might happen a century out, select which of the current trends in their infancy are likely to branch out and bear fruit, which ones will die an inevitable faddish death, and which ones will sustain unchanged as they have done across the centuries…that is no easy task. You could get it horribly wrong, couldn’t you? After all, what you do know is some parts of the present and the past: the bits of the present you have observed for yourself through your particular subjective filter, and the versions of the past you happen to have read and reflected upon. I can imagine it isn’t quite a simple matter to write a dystopian novel, set in the future. Or, alternately, I think of Napoleon, and again I’m not thinking about the French Emperor, but the eponymous pig who’s eventual lord and master of Animal Farm, I mutter ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’, and I doff my imaginary hat to Mr Orwell’s creative genius. Of late, I’ve found myself returning quite frequently to the thoughts and words of two literary giants of the 20th century-Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.Įvery few days, on some issue, on some extended debate (usually in the social media), I find myself murmuring to myself, ‘O Brave New World, that has such people in’t!’ and it is not Miranda in Shakespeare’s Tempest (whose words these are originally) that I’m referring to, but Mr Huxley’s 1934 masterpiece, that in time-honoured tradition referenced the Bard’s words in his title.

Huxley and orwell