By David Wills writing for Quillette
David Wills explains why he believes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 offers a more accurate warning than Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.
It has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms, or government actions “Orwellian.” In 1984, George Orwell so brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, meanwhile, provided a rather different but equally bleak vision of the future that is frequently invoked to illuminate our current malaise.Bradbury’s novel is as gloomy and prescient as either Orwell’s or Huxley’s, but its explanation of how a dystopia is created comes closer to providing an understanding of our new reality.