deluxetrashqueen:

deluxetrashqueen:

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present. 

“Wooow! How did Orwell predict the surveillance state so well in 1984??” 

He didn’t. He was making an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present, and exaggerated it to make the metaphor obvious.

Learning and discussing these works in terms of them being predictions and having test questions like “do you think his prediction came true?” is not only pointless, but actively counterintuitive. When you frame these works as being ‘people from the past knew that the future would be terrible’ you shift the entire perspective to one of some kind of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. 

These author’s aren’t oracles. They’re satirists. Their predictions ‘come true’ because they were already true when they wrote them.