Apocalyptic fiction has got to be one of my favorite genres of literature. It allows for such creativity and the imagining of entirely different worlds, radically different societies, but is somehow much more powerful (for me, anyway) than simple scientific fiction. Apocalyptic fiction, after all, is not set on a distant alien planet, but on our own, in our own futures. And so, as much as we marvel and even mock the strangeness of these future societies, you can't help but ask yourself, "Could we ever get there?"
If I had to pick out the most likely apocalyptic landscape, I would turn to Oryx and Crake, by Maragret Atwood. The fact that it is not on THE LIST is a crime against literature; this book is brilliant, and I cannot stress reading it enough, especially if you work in any scientific field. If I had to hedge my bets, I'd say the world was going to end just in the way Atwood described. In the few years since she published it, we're already moving further into the crazy GMO, science, and virus obsessed 'utopia' she imagined. But I'm not here to talk about Oryx and Crake, I'm here to talk about Brave New World, which is another apocalyptic fiction that I could see coming true all too easily. While 1984 is terrifying and plausible, I cannot imagine our society transforming into a society like that unless a major global catastrophe happened which would circumvent our love of personal liberty and replace it with a desire for security. Brave New World is a much more plausible scenario- it seems only logical that a society of endless distraction and pleasure would be more stable than a society based on repression and secret killing. There are three pillars of the society in Brave New World that I think would ensure its longevity- soma, which eliminates not only bad feelings but also the capacity to treat them as something serious, conditioning, which the book proves to be an almost unshakable force, and the deportation of all who resist the first two measures to Islands, where they will be isolated and have their intellectual curiosities met, effectively neutralizing them as a threat to society. No random midnight killings, no bombings, no torture - this society of weird electric golf and pornography seems rather tame in comparison your normal post-apocalyptic wasteland. But you can see how this sort of thing can sneak up on you- and we can already see it somewhat in our society, with our excessive pursuit of leisure, material goods, and artificial happiness (i.e drugs, alcohol, American Idol). Slippery slope?
Anyway, I could talk about the brilliance of this book forever and ever, but I think the most mind-blowing scene is by far the conversation of between the Savage and Mustapha Mond. It's not dissimilar to the scene between Winston and O'Brien in 1984, the old tried and true "villain explains to his helpless victim the Great Evil Scheme," but this conversation is different. Mustpha Mond clearly treats the Savage as an equal, despite their vastly different situations, and overall it reads like a pleasant chat between two friends on the finer points of philosophy. But of course, it's not. It's nothing less than the fundamental argument between two vastly different ways of life: the sentimental past (argued by the Savage) and the rational future (argued by the Commander). And you're supposed to hate Mond, he's the Bad Guy, but you can't help but see that he's perfectly right, in everything he's saying. It's just such a brilliant exchange, I wish I could quote it all, but I particularly loved the bits about religion, so here...
'"Then you think there is no God?"
"No, I think there quite probably is one."
"Then why?..."
Mustapha Mond checkered him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in those books. Now..."
"How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.
"Well, he manifests himself as an absence. As if he wasn't there at all."'
Brilliant. So one last point; whenever I read these kind of books, you feel bad for the poor people in them, like Lenina, who are clearly off their rockers but can't do anything about it because of their conditioning and society and blah blah blah. But today I was reading about modern dictatorships for class and thinking about this book and realizing that we've probably been "conditioned" too, in different ways, so subtlety that we don't even realize it. I'm not saying we were all forced to listen to a thousand repetitions of "Buy McDonalds hamburgers," in our sleep, but in some ways the control modern society has over us probably makes us a lot more like Lenina than we think. Scary thought...
In summary: This book was published in 1932. Unless you are under the age of thirteen or illiterate, you have no excuse for not reading it yet. Get on it.
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