From a global conflict to a growingly dishonest political culture to the rise of Big Pharma; it’s fair to say that we live in troubling times. But for George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, these issues were foreseeable. In this article, Dr Emrah Atasoy compares the seminal works of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, and explores how we can use fiction as a guide to help identify and overcome the issues within reality.

In a world heavily stricken by disaster and tragedy, we may of late find ourselves asking whether we live in a utopia or dystopia. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing global inflation, rampant consumerism, the war between Ukraine and Russia, post-truth politics, global migration, refugee, and humanitarian crises in the aftermath of various troubles in various countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, rigid explicit or implicit social stratification, the looming ecological collapse, Anthropocentrism, and the recent deadly earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, the world of today often appears closer to a dystopia than a utopia.