Brave New Worlds: Predictions of American Realities in Speculative Fiction Literature

This thesis analyzes the extent to which a selection of five speculative fiction novels have predicted the recent history and current socio-political realities of the United States, focusing on the predictive and retrospective parallels between the literary texts and historical and contemporary sources. In examination of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, social and political histories of the United States are traced through interdisciplinary connections between the texts and nonliterary sources. Through a mixture of close literary analysis and historiographical research, parallels are drawn between 1984’s Orwellian doublethink and alternative facts; suppression of education and the Reagan era; perpetual war and the American military; and Oligarchical Collectivism and the humanities in the United States. In Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, legacies of colonialism, mid-century American capitalism, periods of war, and trends of book bannings are examined, while in The Handmaid’s Tale and Parable of the Sower, comparative analysis is done on Atwood’s Harvard University; the American politics of church and state; antifeminist activists and contemporary tradwives; resource scarcity in present-day California; and the legacy of sexual violence in Indigenous populations. This work explores the comparative prescience of these five novels in their predictions of a speculative future that has become present, and critically examines the ways in which recent American histories have taken paths divergent to those envisioned by the texts.