The Wave

Part of a literary tradition that examines the consequences and realities of life under totalitarian control, The Wave portrays an experiment in fascism. The experiment has a mercifully brief life but is a worthy cousin to novels that reveal the horrors of social control in their most extreme versions.

George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm may be the two most relevant and effective examples of literature in this category. In 1984, Winston lives in a society ruled by a figure known as Big Brother. Privacy is almost obsolete, as is free speech. A frightening group called The Thought Police can imprison anyone for nearly any reason, and imprisonment usually leads to cruel and creative forms of torture. The phrase “Big Brother is always watching,” which recurs throughout 1984, is a constant reminder that a surveillance state never rests. In The Wave, the membership cards assigning some members as monitors, whose purpose is to report deviations from Wave protocol, is a primitive precursor of how a surveillance state could begin.

In Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, a group of animals drive their human master off his farm, liberating themselves from his servitude. They celebrate as equals, and each animal is as good as any other.