I just finised Brave New World, a book which partially inspired B7. It was interesting to compare it with 1984, the other famous dystopian novel, because it is far more troubling. 1984 shows a horrible, horrible future - everyone is trapped in a wholly squalid system that runs itself. Every month they get less chocolate and razors, things are dirty and miserable. I'd much rather live in Brave New World, because it is a utopia. There is no illness or disease, no unhappiness, no conflict. And no free will. It's not challenging for a reader to choose between misery and freedom (although obviously its characters have rather a nastier decision to make). But choosing freedom, as a high liberal principle noble for its own sakes, over a society in which everyone is content with their lot and well fed and housed, is harder. The type of decision I could have made easily a few years ago, when I was in my suicidal-heroism/decadent-aestheticism phase, but has got exponentially trickier since developing a social conscience courtesty of Verity Lambert and Sidney Newman. Which isn't to say I was wrong in the past; just that extremes of any sort tend to be wrong. A dystopio-utopio-opia...
It's also exacerbated thoughts I've had for some time: is one human life worth a great work of art? You need to be a Doctor Who fan to get your mind in a position where
travelling in time and changing the past while understanding its effects on the future, seems plausible. If you could prevent the sinking of the "Estonia", or the birth of "John Wayne Gacy jr.", prevent the horrors, and prevent the beautiful songs they inspired. If you could stop the world wars - no war movies, no war poets, no war journalism or photography. If you could stop war full stop - conflict, full stop, then drama would be bunk, and so would art and fiction.
This has troubled me a lot since stumbling into fandoms where people could be more important that principles. And Brave New World is a novel that tackles it head on, so I felt uncomfortable throughout. My mind kept hitting this closed loop.
In many ways, it was a shockingly similar - in that it is primarily concerned with man's two most important questions about the future:
1984 is obviously less advanced - they achieve the same ends through opposite means. Sex is almost totally cracked down on. People are trained to be prudish, necessary reproduction is "our duty to the party", but, for party members at least, extreme repression is the order of the day. The intent is the same - passion between couples, and thereby friendship/love to individuals over the state, has to be discouraged. Kids are conditioned after birth by organisations like the Spies, so family breaks down. A sense of shame in the society is necessary to prudce the same results.
This impacts the two plots bigtime. In 1984, sex is freedom. In Brave New World, quite the reverse - chastity is. I'm not sure this proves anything, except that the world is obsessed. Despite this fundamental difference, their stance on books is the same. Literature is a freedom, escape. Winston rescues Oranges and Lemons, while John recites Shakespeare. And because of this, there is the same concern with suppressed literature, propaganda (words put to evil) and language.
I think 1984 does the best job of blending the two. I tried finding my notes from my previous read, but I must not have written them down. I remember thinking how sex becomes the political act, and how, mirrorlike, reading is treated with an almost ecstatic fervour. It was an excellent theory, but frankly I can't facing that book again right now. You can measure my remaining Blake's 7 stock however you like, but temporally speaking the idea of only having two weeks left (five episodes at one every three days equals fifteen days...) is sufficiently unbearable that I'm bearing it by engaging in a healthy dose of doublethink. I can consider all the solutions suggested in my previous post, with the lightness of fanfiction.
B7 blends the two to perfection. We get five mintues of Brave New World, and we have to assume that's what the world looks like to its inhabitants. And then four seasons of 1984, its slimey underbelly. BNW works because its conditioning techniques are fallible. B7 borrows much of its terminology - the world is kept under control by conditioning, suppressive drugs, soma and an identical grading system - but unlike BNW, it seems to be less efficient. Maybe a future BNW in which the drugs don't work. So it also borrows ideas from 1984 - mostly "the world is awful. Here, have some betrayal!" - to counterbalance it. This is more realistic in a way, one book being too mean, the other too perfect, to totally convince.
And I've enjoyed rebuilding ideas from BNW into the world we never see on the telly. I like the idea of, if not cloning, then separating children from families at an early age. The B7 characters are fully able to do emotion and free will, which suggests a more 1984 system is in place, of propaganda and social pressure - with maybe some gentle scientific conditioning to discourage them, like the suppressants. We see that conditioning can also be thrown off with luck and effort, so maybe the Administration would be unwilling to overuse it. I like the idea that in the absence of family, people would find and form their own - their own bands of brothers.
Anyway, very glad to have read it, and it's definitely provided food for thought. 1984 is still the better novel - though both are exercises in political theorising, it feel more like it is a real book as well. You get a better sense of the characters, and you get to like them more. I never had the same emotional response to BNW. Nevertheless, when I've more time I will type out some quotes I particularly enjoyed.
It's also exacerbated thoughts I've had for some time: is one human life worth a great work of art? You need to be a Doctor Who fan to get your mind in a position where
travelling in time and changing the past while understanding its effects on the future, seems plausible. If you could prevent the sinking of the "Estonia", or the birth of "John Wayne Gacy jr.", prevent the horrors, and prevent the beautiful songs they inspired. If you could stop the world wars - no war movies, no war poets, no war journalism or photography. If you could stop war full stop - conflict, full stop, then drama would be bunk, and so would art and fiction.This has troubled me a lot since stumbling into fandoms where people could be more important that principles. And Brave New World is a novel that tackles it head on, so I felt uncomfortable throughout. My mind kept hitting this closed loop.
In many ways, it was a shockingly similar - in that it is primarily concerned with man's two most important questions about the future:
- Will there be sex?
- Will there be books?
1984 is obviously less advanced - they achieve the same ends through opposite means. Sex is almost totally cracked down on. People are trained to be prudish, necessary reproduction is "our duty to the party", but, for party members at least, extreme repression is the order of the day. The intent is the same - passion between couples, and thereby friendship/love to individuals over the state, has to be discouraged. Kids are conditioned after birth by organisations like the Spies, so family breaks down. A sense of shame in the society is necessary to prudce the same results.
This impacts the two plots bigtime. In 1984, sex is freedom. In Brave New World, quite the reverse - chastity is. I'm not sure this proves anything, except that the world is obsessed. Despite this fundamental difference, their stance on books is the same. Literature is a freedom, escape. Winston rescues Oranges and Lemons, while John recites Shakespeare. And because of this, there is the same concern with suppressed literature, propaganda (words put to evil) and language.
I think 1984 does the best job of blending the two. I tried finding my notes from my previous read, but I must not have written them down. I remember thinking how sex becomes the political act, and how, mirrorlike, reading is treated with an almost ecstatic fervour. It was an excellent theory, but frankly I can't facing that book again right now. You can measure my remaining Blake's 7 stock however you like, but temporally speaking the idea of only having two weeks left (five episodes at one every three days equals fifteen days...) is sufficiently unbearable that I'm bearing it by engaging in a healthy dose of doublethink. I can consider all the solutions suggested in my previous post, with the lightness of fanfiction.
B7 blends the two to perfection. We get five mintues of Brave New World, and we have to assume that's what the world looks like to its inhabitants. And then four seasons of 1984, its slimey underbelly. BNW works because its conditioning techniques are fallible. B7 borrows much of its terminology - the world is kept under control by conditioning, suppressive drugs, soma and an identical grading system - but unlike BNW, it seems to be less efficient. Maybe a future BNW in which the drugs don't work. So it also borrows ideas from 1984 - mostly "the world is awful. Here, have some betrayal!" - to counterbalance it. This is more realistic in a way, one book being too mean, the other too perfect, to totally convince.
And I've enjoyed rebuilding ideas from BNW into the world we never see on the telly. I like the idea of, if not cloning, then separating children from families at an early age. The B7 characters are fully able to do emotion and free will, which suggests a more 1984 system is in place, of propaganda and social pressure - with maybe some gentle scientific conditioning to discourage them, like the suppressants. We see that conditioning can also be thrown off with luck and effort, so maybe the Administration would be unwilling to overuse it. I like the idea that in the absence of family, people would find and form their own - their own bands of brothers.
Anyway, very glad to have read it, and it's definitely provided food for thought. 1984 is still the better novel - though both are exercises in political theorising, it feel more like it is a real book as well. You get a better sense of the characters, and you get to like them more. I never had the same emotional response to BNW. Nevertheless, when I've more time I will type out some quotes I particularly enjoyed.
Comments (1)
Back to Orson Welles cookoo clock speech. No war, no war poems. No unrequited love, no love poems and so forth. In the Sci-Fi short Nul-P, a post-apocalyptic earth becomes obsessed with Mr average strife ends, striving ends and thus human development ends. The world stagnates and is taken over by Labrador retrievers.