Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are awkward literary twins. Most readers discover them around the same age, in a kind of two-for-one deal on classic dystopias, and therefore see them as rival prophecies, as if both authors were, at the same point in time, given the same brief to predict the future, and now we have to decide which was the more accurate. Pleasure or punishment? Sex or death? A hit of soma or a boot in the face? Who got it right?
