“I will keep an eye out for [Smith] now.”
He’s pretty good, this was a very interesting article. I don’t really think he’s right about the “classics” and publishing, I’ve heard that publishers love that copyright free material. But it could be changing as ebooks advance.
I read BNW years ago and didn’t like it very much. I thought it very inferior to 1984 which I found absolutely harrowing. When I finished 1984 I thought “well, I’m really glad I read this and neither a million dollars nor a gun to my head will every get me to read it again”.
Maybe I should read BNW again, it does seem to be coming true, I often think of those test-tube babies!
Huxley and Orwell were fleshing out the future from different angles, not in competition. Orwell’s is exterior, so to speak, in that it was from the vantage point of a futuristic totalitarian state. Huxley’s is interior, depicting a world in which our inner corruptions become writ large across society. His was much more an examination of personal morality.