Sometimes a story is a better way of getting a point across—be it a political, economic, or moral point—than an expository work making the same point. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and his 1984 are both powerful attacks on totalitarianism. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is an eloquent diatribe against the tyranny of technological progress. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle tells us more about the petty cruelty and inhumanity of the Soviet bureaucracy than a hundred factual studies and reports.
