The Fragility of Democracy III: Afraid New World

Photo by Malamas Sotiriou

By a strange and dystopian coincidence, during this pandemic I’ve been teaching Brave New World to a group of Chinese Australians in Melbourne. If history shows us the lessons of the past, dystopian fiction, through its exaggerated envisioning of the present, offers an insight into a possible future.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — a book which struck me as out-of-date when I…