Comparison Of Dystopia And George Orwell's Brave New World

The media has been depicting the future in various ways. Ever since man started to ponder on the thought of the uncertainty of prospective events, a lot of possibilities were offered. These were represented in numerous media types—print, film, television, art and so on. The first wave of artists were very optimistic. The future was illustrated as an ideal place wherein everything is in order and nothing is wrong. Such settings are called utopias, which came from the Greek words οὐ and τόπος and was the framework of Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s Christanopolis, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Hillegas 3-4). This was counteracted, however, by the batch of artists that came thereafter. They have acknowledged

These books established the niche of dystopia in the literary world by introducing unusual themes such as totalitarian control and freedom deprivation. World Wars I & II were said to have strongly influenced these plots. Environmental issues, the Cold War and identity politics, on the other hand, were the inspirations of the second batch of dystopian authors. Titles from Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale to Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, were part of this group of books that talked mostly about trust issues to the government and anxieties regarding the human body. The third and last group of books have been a combination of pubescence issues, vapidity of pop cultures and all the other issues tackled by the first two waves of dystopian literature (Hintz 255). Targeted mostly to teenage audiences, this includes Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Abby Condie’s Matched, Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, Veronica Roth’s Divergent and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games

Teenage dilemmas that are usually present in coming-of-age literature, such as physical pain, self-anxiety, sexual turmoil or awakening, add dramatic tension and intensify the actions done by the protagonist (Hintz 256). Inasmuch as teenage readers relate in such dilemmas, these novels are greatly appreciated by the majority of them. In fact, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a young adult author, Ph.D and cognitive scholar, states that "Teens are caught between two worlds, childhood and adulthood, and in YA, they can navigate those two worlds and sometimes dualities of other worlds." (qtd. In CNN). Hence, dystopian novels provide a quick escape to the realities of the mundane world. However, E.Lockhart, the author of the young adult novel We Were Liars, The Boyfriend List and Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, mentioned in an interview that “Fiction is not a vehicle for life lessons. [But] It is a vehicle for exploration of things that are impossible to summarize in another form—complex and sometimes contradictory elements of human emotional life.” (Scout 8). It could then implied that dystopian fiction is not designed to teach something to its readers. However, due to the current conditions teenagers are exposed with, they have most likely envisioned various outcomes that would all boil down to a dystopian world (Penny 19; Serarfini and Blasingame