Four Kinds of Dystopia
Cool taxonomy, but are there really <i>only</i> four types? Let&#x27;s try with some examples.<p>Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut - imagines a future where mechanical automation and IQ-optimized hiring leads to mass unemployment, but extensive welfare systems keeps the mediocre masses well-fed, just demoralized and without dignity. Combination of Huxleyan with Kafkaesque?<p>The Handmaid&#x27;s Tale - Orwellian with a pronounced patriarchal-religious emphasis<p>Anthem by Ayn Rand - generic Orwellian with a primitivist&#x2F;preindustrial Luddite version of Phildickian.<p>(Actually, we run into a convergence there. Isn&#x27;t Orwellian thought control simply the overt forcible version of Phildickian thought control, the latter is more indirect, subtle, and possibly not even enforced by the state but private actors and individuals? Both involve rewriting your mind to reject liberty.)<p>Fahrenheit 451 - similar Phildickian rewriting of reality through both Orwellian (the firemen, the unspecified war in the background) and Huxleyan (parlor walls, overload of useless factoids) means.<p>Atlas Shrugged - world&#x2F;U.S. in the beginning is not totalitarian, but a generic degenerate socialist bureaucratic state in decline. Whether or not Galt&#x27;s Gulch is totalitarian, and what type it is, can be left as an exercise to the reader.<p>Neuromancer, Snow Crash, other classic cyberpunk works- not totalitarian, but heavy on the Huxleyan decadent consumerist society coupled with Phildickian distortion of reality themes.<p>Brazil by Terry Gilliam - perfectly Kafkaesque.<p>Would appreciate classification of some other classic dystopian <i>totalitarian</i> works, such as We by Zamyatin or even Animal Farm. Do any of them express totalitarianism in a way that breaks the four-type classification system?