I love dystopias. Especially those in which the "world of the future" is depicted as realistic as possible and without romantic embellishments. And in which there is no happy ending. Therefore, if "We" or "Fahrenheit 451" seem somewhat "fabulous", then from the novels of Orwell and Huxley it still becomes scary, although they were written almost a hundred years ago. And every year it gets worse …
Many new dystopias of varying degrees of talent and dullness are also being created. But in general, the genre of dystopia itself is a very scary and creepy genre. On the one hand, these books show how ugly the world can become if some social disadvantage is given the opportunity to fully develop. The disadvantages are very different - this is not only the granting of power to a certain "strong hand", but also the banal craving of people for constant entertainment, puritanical norms of morality, disregard for reading, and the like.
But on the other hand, dystopia can become an excellent textbook for those who seriously intend to grab unlimited power in the country or even in the whole world, to crush everything and everything for themselves. Some dystopias contain a fairly detailed description of how to build hellish dictatorships, what methods you need to use to achieve unlimited power, how to subdue millions of people to your will with imperceptible and bloodless methods.
No wonder most of the dystopias in the USSR were strictly prohibited. Banned for ordinary citizens, that is, "proles" (according to Orwell), but in the highest echelons of power these novels were well known. And they probably drew ideas from them.
The fate of the Soviet fairy tale "Dunno on the Moon" testifies to the fact that dystopias can be textbooks for dictators. In fact, this is another dystopia, written in an "ideologically correct" key. So, some oligarchs and politicians admitted that it was this fairy-tale book by Nikolai Nosov that played a significant role for them in building a new Russia.
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In "Dunno on the Moon" capitalism is depicted, moreover, distorted and hypertrophied; even the most imperfect - American capitalism has not been that way, at least since the 1930s. That is, it was an openly propaganda novel filled with caricatured clichés in accordance with the communist ideology. However, in the nineties in Russia it was precisely this model of capitalism that was depicted in the fairy tale, with all its caricatured attributes and parodies of itself, triumphed. Such an ugly system was beneficial to the new masters of the country (more precisely, to the “new old masters”), while other, real models of foreign capitalism were not beneficial to them.
This applies not only to our country. In a sense, the sky thickens over the entire inhabited world. And what yesterday seemed like absolute fantasy and delirium of madmen, in our time, in a strange way, is realized.