Dystopias in the rear-view mirror

I came in contact with Margret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake in a course entitled “Sustainable development” which is a part of the Teacher Programme. This novel and another one, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1984) are analyzed in this essay. Oryx and Crake deals with topics related to the end of the world and Orwell’s novel deals with the disadvantages of a totalitarian state. The essay aims to look at these dystopian novels retrospectively and draw parallels to the current situation in Sweden in 2010. In order to make this essay comprehensible, one theme has been chosen for in-depth analysis from each novel respectively. The theme chosen for analysis from 1984 is Control and the one chosen from Oryx and Crake is Science. The conclusion that one can draw from this essay, is that some of the authors’ worries about the future turned out to be justified while some of them could simply be considered to be fantasies.Validerat; 20101217 (root