The anecdote gives the impression that Orwell was the doomiest man in London, but he held no monopoly on pessimism. In his introduction to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted a worldwide epidemic of totalitarianism, lulling populations into servitude with drugs, sexual promiscuity and genetic engineering. He decided that his novel’s six-hundred-year countdown to dystopia had been far too rosy: “To-day it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval.” That same
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