Imagining the Future: The 1920s "Today and Tomorrow" Series: The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, The Road & The Ministry of the Future

by Leon Surette

In 1920 British authors were invited to contribute to a a publishers series of books predicting what the world would look like in 2020 called Today and Tomorrow.. Contributors believed only a less democratic future -- whether Communist or Capitalist -- could avoid a future war, inspiring Aldous Huxley's vision of a totalitarian future in Brave New World. Continental thinkers, Oswald Spengler and Ortega y Gasset concurred.. That anti-democratic consensus and Communist sympathies were shattered by the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and the Cold War that followed World War II. 1984, Orwell's dystopic vision of an oligarchical regime, provided a vision of oligarchy much less sunny that Huxley's in Brave New World. Looking pre WWI, E. M Forster's had predicted a future much more like the actual 2020 in the short story, "The Machine Stops." That work anticipates two twenty-first century works based on a global epidemiological or ecological Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Kim Stanley Robinson's the Ministry of the Future. 2020, after all, looks distressingly like 1920!

280 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 8, 2022