Soon after 1984 was published George Orwell sent a copy to his old French teacher – better known as Aldous Huxley, author of the other great dystopian novel, Brave New World.

Huxley’s answer, now posted on Letters of Note, complimented Orwell’s book but argued that his own vision of the future was more likely to come true:   

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.