SOURCE: Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Dystopian Imagination.” Current, no. 439 (January 2002): 29-33.

In the following essay, Dalrymple discusses some of the reasons for the popularity and proliferation of dystopian writings in the twentieth century.

Why did the twentieth century produce so many—and such vivid—dystopias, works of fiction depicting not an ideal future but a future as terrible as could be imagined? After all, never had material progress been greater; never should man have felt himself freer of the anxieties that, with good reason, had beset him in the past. Famine had all but disappeared, except in civil wars or where regimes deliberately engineered it; and for the first time in history, the biblical span—or longer—was a reasonable hope for many. Medicine had conquered the dread infectious diseases that once cut swathes through entire populations. Not to enjoy luxuries that Louis XIV couldn't have imagined now was...