Oscar Wilde once wrote. Today, that quote has met its reality but not in the poetic dream-like way that was once hoped. Dystopian fiction is no longer a distant genre but rather found in daily news headlines, igniting a cruel feeling of déjà vu. Novels like 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Hunger Games, once studied as exaggerated stories, are beginning to mirror the lived reality for far too many around the globe.
In 2025, mass surveillance, growing influences of AI, fake news and misinformation blur the line between reality and fiction. In Orwell’s 1984, the consequences of a surveillance state are exposed under Big Brother, who control their own narrative through the manipulated language of “newspeak”. Today, language is still being weaponised and used to distort reality. This can be seen in Russia’s description of its invasion of Ukraine as a ‘military operation’ or in state-controlled narratives in North Korea. Even closer are the continuous presence of smartphones, cameras and social media feeds that keep us more glued to screens more than ever before, feeding us our own filtered newspeak. Fake news, deepfakes and distractions have infiltrated our reality, making it hard to even trust what we see with our own eyes, after all
“who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”.
Earlier this year, The Handmaids Tale was heartbreakingly echoed in the state of Georgia. Adriana Smith, a 30-year old nurse was declared brain-dead but her body was kept on life-support as she was pregnant. This same scenario was played out in the horrific realm of Atwood’s Gilead, in which Offred is forced to mourn the body of Ofmatthew, which merely becomes a vessel. A world in which unborn children are valued more than the bodies of the women who carry them and their families, is no longer fictional. Especially with Trump’s Supreme Courts’ overruling of Roe v. Wade and threats on reproductive rights, abortion and contraception access. Atwood herself admits that she didn’t invent anything within her novel, these events of oppression are historically and currently all too real.
And finally, even The Hunger Games has resurfaced in public discourse. The most recent prequel pictures intense propaganda, spreading of fear, criminalising of protest and the favouring of the elite in society. Class divisions that are all too obvious in the celebration of events such as the Met Gala, which even exhibited Effie Trinket’s dress last year at the same time as massacres, blockades and bombings were happening across Gaza. Grand distractions are no longer enough to make the general public forget about the monstrosities that are occurring in our own dystopian and unjust world.
Yet these beloved texts helpfully remind us that hope is stronger than fear. Dystopian fiction warns and teaches that even in the darkest times, people can come together.
If life imitates art, let’s make sure we write our own way to a more peaceful future.
