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Good Bad Books: Our Love Affair with Dystopia | University of Birmingham

Professor Nathan Waddell Inaugural Lecture Why do we enjoy reading about suffering? The philosopher Bertrand Russell toyed with the idea that we delight in books like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower because we’re thrilled by their horrors. It may also be the case that bad places, lovingly described, entail their own, counter-intuitive kinds of pleasure. Are good books about bad places a contradiction in terms? Can we learn from the careful attention writers pay to, and their stylish efforts to describe, the worst of all possible worlds? Reflecting on the history of literary dystopias, in this lecture I’ll suggest that our love affair with dystopia lies in this tension between form and content—in the generative strain between what dystopian novelists write about and how they write about it. Are dystopian books as radical as we tend to think? Or do they enjoyably indulge our fears, compensating for unease with craft? Nathan Waddell is a Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Modern John Buchan (2009), Modernist Nowheres (2012), Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (2019), and A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell (2025). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Orwell’s novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (2021), and The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell (2025), and a co-editor of essay volumes on Buchan, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and utopianism. Inaugural lectures are a landmark in academic life, held on the appointment of new professorships. 00:00 Introduction 02:57 The meaning of dystopia and utopia 06:44 Stories about bullies 09:38 The enjoyment of these stories 10:55 The kick of horror 13:59 Warnings of bad futures 14:30 Octavia Butler and Parable of the Sower 19:09 Our worst fears confirmed 21:10 Aldous Huxley and Brave New World 25:16 George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four 28:17 Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale 31:53 Culture and Democracy 35:20 Global slide into totalitarianism 38:47 Why is it always raining in Utopia? 40:40 The enjoyment of literature