Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fiction called 'prophetic' by critics, citizens are manufactured by genetic engineering on assembly lines to fulfill their respective roles in society, they anaesthetise themselves into acceptance by sex and opiates, children are conditioned to hate flowers and books, the calendar begins from the first creation of cars on the assembly line of ford, A.F.- after ford- as opposed to -anno domine- A.D. polygamy is encouraged and monogamy is a perversion, love and parentage are disgusting anachronisms to the conditioned citizens of the brave new world
3 characters have the intimation of the emptiness of their lives, one is a woman who falls in love with a man who is physically defective for the caste he was engineered for, another is a case of refinement above his upper echelon purpose, a fortunate idiosyncracy of the assembly line,
The society is predicated on empty hedonism, the material needs are provided for, so the culture is without neccessity and without purpose, or meaning, it is not a totalitarian imposition, it's enclosed upon itself by citizens' anaesthetised acquiescence.
The soma the citizens consume resemble psychiatric medication to assuage the anxiety of a life without purpose or meaning, the material needs are provided for, the spiritual sense negated, reflected in the calander measurement, of "our Ford"
Aldous Huxley lamented he did not include nuclear power in the narrative, it would have lended the prediction greater accuracy, a complaint in spite of the accuracy of the culture he wrote of in the novel, it was so spot on, using nuclear power as a concept would have been clairvoyant
I read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, the edition of the Communist Manifesto had a treatise on the horrific conditions of the lives of the newly created working class in the major cities of Britain, "property is theft" and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" appeared to be an appropriate response to the injustices inflicted by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, the Manifesto is thought to be a worthy ideal because it advocates for property to be centralised, parentage is negated in the manifesto itself
I think Aldous Huxley took the communist manifesto as a template for the utopian ideal inverted in brave new world, characters include a woman called Lenina and a protagonist named Marx,
In the Gulag Archipelago a faithful rendition of the disaster of Stalinist USSR is revealed in its outright hellishness, a criticism to a friend of the regime was weighty enough to be sentenced to a 5 year prison term, that is a minute detail in the epilogue of horrors, not to be glib, but it was hell.