Red Sky at Morning
Superstar
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2017
- Messages
- 13,933
From time to time you read a book that becomes a lens through which other things become clearer.
Years ago (fresh from the memory of talking with an exchange student who had grown up in Soviet Russia) I read both 1984 and Brave New World. Dystopian literature often takes trends in the present world and extrapolates a future if those trends were to continue. The problem I had was that both of these visions left you feeling one very clear emotion - hopelessness.
Which brings me on to the topic of this thread. For me, the best dystopian novel I have ever read was “That Hideous Strength”, by C.S. Lewis. Dubbed a “fairy tale for adults”, it explores scores of themes in story form that come up regularly in the observations of @VigilantCitizen including transhumanism, occult initiation, Hegelian dialectic, freemasonry etc etc.
The one key difference I noticed as I read was that it managed to retain humour, optimism and courage in the face of a global dystopia.
Years ago (fresh from the memory of talking with an exchange student who had grown up in Soviet Russia) I read both 1984 and Brave New World. Dystopian literature often takes trends in the present world and extrapolates a future if those trends were to continue. The problem I had was that both of these visions left you feeling one very clear emotion - hopelessness.
Which brings me on to the topic of this thread. For me, the best dystopian novel I have ever read was “That Hideous Strength”, by C.S. Lewis. Dubbed a “fairy tale for adults”, it explores scores of themes in story form that come up regularly in the observations of @VigilantCitizen including transhumanism, occult initiation, Hegelian dialectic, freemasonry etc etc.
The one key difference I noticed as I read was that it managed to retain humour, optimism and courage in the face of a global dystopia.
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