DYSTOPIAN FICTION
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Aldous Huxley
The
scientist J.B.S. Haldane wrote Daedalus (1923) for The Heretic Society. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote Icarus
in reply. Huxley's novel Brave New World was informed by one or both.
Location:
16 Bracknell Gardens, NW3 7EB
Website:
www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Huxley/ahsl
Nature's Soul
In the
first part of the Timaeus (c.360 B.C.) Plato argued the world had
been imbued with a soul (halozoeism/heilozoeism). The idea was Christianised by Plato s
commentator Plotinus (c.204-270).
The world soul was regarded as being the Holy Ghost. This view of the world as an organism
predisposed people to speculate upon what its purpose might; what Aristotle
termed final causes.
The
scientific revolution regarded the Earth as being matter in motion. This view was articulated by the likes of
Boyle and Descartes. It undermined the
Earth/soul argument. The scientific
revolution sought to remove final causes from science.
However,
Henry Moore and the Neo-Platonists were of the view that matter was not
dead. Moore and Newton were close. Moore may have influenced his friend s
thinking.
An
adverse criticism that Cartesians made of Newton was that Newtonian physics
relied upon action at a distance.
In the
wake of Newton, materialism experienced a tough time during the 18thC. Matters such as magnetism and chemistry
became the objects of curiosity and research.
The anti-materialism strand led to the emergence at the end of the
century of the nature philosophers, e.g. Friedrich Schelling
(1775-1854).
At the
age of seventeen Shelley wrote a 65-page essay on the Timaeus.
Coleridge
was the conduit by which Schelling's ideas were transferred to the American
Transcendalists, particular Emerson and then Thoreau.
Most
mainstream Protestants were wary of the theory gaia. Roman Catholics and Joseph Smith the Mormon
founder were open to it.
The Romantics
The
Romantics had an apocalyptic strain to their thought. There was a concern about volcanoes. Byron wrote explicitly about climate change.
Byron s
short poem Darkness (1816) was set in a world that has undergone a form
of environmental disaster
Mary
Shelley's dystopian novel The Last Man (1826) described the world at the
end of the 21stC in which rising heat causes mass migration and then
a plague kills everyone but a single survivor.
She started it after hearing of Byron's death. This caused her to feel that she was the last
of her group. Its apocalyptic character
ran against Romanticism's underlying faith in humanity's capacity to overcome
natural disasters.
Richard
Jeffreys's After London (1885) was one of the first portrayals of a
disaster causing a change to a simpler society.
He was known primarily as a nature writer.
A Trip To The Island of Equality
A
Trip To The Island of Equality (1792) was a reply to Thomas Paine's Rights
of Man. It has come to be regarded
as one of the first works of dystopian fiction.
David
Backhouse 2024