An article in the Guardian a few days ago reviewed books from the past – for example from Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood – that have in some sense foreseen major developments which have impacted our age today. It is a somewhat concerning article as most of those developments have not been particularly beneficial. They might make a good novel but they do not make a very good world.
There is an interesting section about writers who predicted a society in which surveillance was a major feature, such as Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932) or Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949). These novels are described as being “so absurdly relevant to our age of surveillance capitalism that it seems our tech barons have used them not as satirical warnings but as motivational texts”.
What it refers to as a “successor to these novels” is Margaret Atwood’s amazing 1985 book, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, which describes a future USA in which religion has become a reactionary government’s tool for controlling its people, including the “control of women’s bodies”.
In Philip K Dick’s ‘The Minority Report’ (1956), the article reminds us that “pre-crime units employ psychics to predict future crimes so the police can make pre-emptive arrests. What happens, Dick asks, if a crime is predicted but the future malefactor changes their mind? Are they still pre-guilty?” Apparently pre-crime operations are currently being trialled across the UK, using data mining, predictive algorithms and facial recognition in place of psychics.
These types of ‘future fiction’ are, according to Margaret Atwood, really deep examinations of the present age in which they are written. What are today’s novels predicting the future saying about our own age?
Do read Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. It taught me so much about religion and how it can be abused. It is frightening to see the little hooks for that kind of society now developing in Russia, the US and – in the hands of some – in the UK too.
And did you know that many books we have taken for granted over the years are now banned in some or all of the State of Florida? Such books include ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, ‘Jaws` by Peter Benchley, ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseine, ‘The Day of the Jackal’ by Frederick Forsyth and almost everything written by Stephen King!
Read the Guardian article here.
Picture above: A scene from the TV portrayal of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.