Prof's Choice

Doublespeak, equality, and negative utopias

Edward Bellamy, Waking Backward (1888, reprinted by Viking Penguin, 1982). A man falls asleep in the late 1800s and awakens.in Boston in the year 2000. Bellamy's Marxist philosophy is a little heavy-handed, but he gets credit for predicting .shopping malls and credit cards from the nineteenth century.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harper & Row 1932). A shocking fiction showing a genetic negative Utopia in which Huxley portrays "buds" born into a caste systern that controls them through scientific programming. Students particularly like Huxley's idea that inhabitants could take a vacation by using a drug called Soma to space out.

Ray Bradbury, Fabrenbeit 451 (Ballantine Books, 1953). Anove about firemen who instead of squelching fires, are paid to start them in order to burn all books. A favorite among the students because of the censorship debate and the depiction of a world where exiled professors must memorize books to keep knowledge from being lost altogether.

George Orwell, 1984 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1949). The classic "Negative Utopia" novel in which doublespeak obscures peoples' ability to think for them-selves and leaves them vulnerable to being controlled by Big Brother. Shocking in that what Orwell imagined a half century ago seems to be coming true.

Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986). It's Been Said that if society is ever put into the hands of the radical right, this is what's going to happen. A feminist wake-up call about a political world in which women are used as sperm receptacles, and where citizens are forbidden to read, write, or use money.

Lois Lowry The Giver {Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993). Written for children, this novel nevertheless offers an interesting perspective for adults on what it would be like to a 12-year-old boy living in a gray world of equality without color, feeling sex, or memory.

James Redfield The Celestine Prophety (Warner Books. 1993). A somewhat idealistic book proposing a spiritual path that would combine our modern respect for technology with a more ancient and intuitive respect for nature and humanity.

Worman