![]() ![]() Rick Deckard, one of the unfortunate, ‘kills’ renegade androids (‘replicants’) for a living. Set in a post-apocalyptic 1992 (2021 in later editions, and 2019 in the film adaptation, ‘Blade Runner’), the rich have gone to live off-world (Mars, perhaps?) and everyone else has been left behind. This ground-breaking and very readable novel tells the story of how war and pollution have left the Earth almost uninhabitable. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. The film adaptation says it’s down to radiation and plague. The reason for zero birth rate in ‘The Children of Men’ is that men’s sperm count has dropped to zero – it isn’t specified whether this is down to natural causes or human action, such as nuclear fallout. ![]() The situation could be changed if employees were offered a better work balance. Set in England in 2021, this is another novel where society is ruled by an autocratic government, in which a single person or party (the autocrat) possesses supreme and absolute power, but this time the birth rate is zero, with no children born since 1995.Īt present, the birth rate in developed countries has been declining for decades – women are having fewer babies, and fertility rates decline with age. With today’s worries about facial-recognition software being employed everywhere (the Police National Database contains about 20 million faces), voice assistants doing things they aren’t meant to do (Amazon said it’s because the devices are ‘mishearing’ requests), and workplace surveillance checking you’re doing your job properly – research firm Gartner found that 50 per cent of large businesses monitor employees, which can mean logging keystrokes, or recording your Google searches – some believe we are moving towards an Orwellian surveillance state. The Party (with Big Brother as its leader), which rules Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, employs the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. The dystopian novel describes a world under oppressive government surveillance and manipulated by propaganda, and historical negationism (distortion of history). One of the best sci-fi novels of all time, ‘1984’ highlights many issues we seem to have in our society now. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (1949) ![]()
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