In the seven decades since its publication, 1984 has never been out of print.

It shot back to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in the three months following Donald Trump's election.

George Orwell's name has become synonymous with some of our darkest fears.

His warning about the way in which language can be corrupted and weaponised seems as pertinent today as it ever has.

But he wasn't the only 20th-century writer of prescient dystopian fiction.

In fact, there are other highly speculative classics that better fit our social and political times.

Brave New World

Writing at the beginning of the Cold War, Orwell accurately cast forward to describe the tactics and reality-bending excesses of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

"The threat within 1984 is a threat that's entirely external to human society — it's the overweening censorious totalitarian state that tells you what to think, that tells you what to believe, that manufactures the economy of information," ABC religion and ethics broadcaster Scott Stephens says.

But what Orwell failed to foresee, says Stephens, was the rise of consumerist capitalism and its far subtler means of mass enslavement.

Writing more than a decade-and-a-half before the publication of 1984, Aldous Huxley envisioned a very different "negative utopia".

His celebrated novel Brave New World is a parable about the "dehumanisation of human beings".

A world, Huxley said, where "man has been subordinated to his own inventions — science, technology, social organisation".

Huxley was far more attuned to the internal dynamics of Western culture, Stephens says.

Are we moving towards Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'? ( Getty: xavierarnau )

He credits the author with being the first to imagine an "attention economy" where people actively seek endless distraction as a means of avoiding the worries and cares of everyday life.

"Huxley had this remarkable way of describing what the media would become. He said the media would stop trading in information and instead it would trade in sentiment," Stephens says.

"His vision of the future of television, for instance, was what he described as the 'feelies' — you tune in, you plug in, in order to feel, in order to be distracted."

The endless quest for instant self-gratification and mainstream pornography were key elements of Huxley's vision, as well as the widespread encouragement of recreational drugs — all of which were used to dull, rather than excite, the populace.

As the American media theorist Neil Postman observed: "In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure."

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no-one who wanted to read one," Postman wrote.

"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."

Aldous Huxley envisaged a "negative utopia". ( Getty: Photo12/Universal Images )

The power of Huxley's vision, therefore, was the notion that seemingly free-acting individuals could enslave themselves to their own desires.

Stephens believes it's that sense of personal culpability that makes Brave New World a far more uncomfortable read than 1984.

Network and its echo in populist politics

The idea that the devil resides within was also a theme explored by legendary Hollywood screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.

His 1976 cinematic masterpiece Network, for which he won his third Academy Award, was both a commercial and critical success.

It centres on the demagogic appeal of an ageing and once respected TV news anchor, Howard Beale, who threatens to kill himself on live television when his ratings begin to drop.

Beale is initially suspended, but when news of his intended action sees a massive spike in ratings, the network not only grants him a reprieve, but refashions his identity as the "mad prophet of the airwaves".

Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay Network took the dystopian fiction genre into the newsroom. ( Getty: LMPC )

Network, like Brave New World, determines an innate human weakness for distraction and triviality.

As with Huxley's novel, it was initially considered wildly, even outrageously, speculative.

"The people who worked in media, who worked in news at the time, thought it was kind of fanciful and a little ridiculous," says Dave Itzkoff, author of the biography Mad as Hell and a culture reporter for the New York Times.

"I don't think those same people would say that about the movie today."

Chayefsky was a deeply pessimistic man, Itzkoff says, who would have found it difficult to deal with today's internet and social media culture. But his fears about the infantilisation of society strike a very modern chord.

"So many of the messages that it has are completely applicable to a kind of 2019 media environment, the way that emotion completely overruns a kind of fact-based delivery system," he says.

"Also, the way that larger and larger corporations subsume these journalistic entities and completely demolish their mission in the name of becoming more profitable."

Central to Network's message is the subjugation of empathy to entertainment.

Beale's public struggle with his sanity is reduced to commercial fodder, while even violent extremists eventually find a place in the nightly TV line-up as long as they guarantee high ratings.

"He was using media and television news as a kind of a microcosm for all of society," Itzkoff says.

"Here's what happens when people become completely disconnected from each other and only interested in pursuing profit and going after the lowest common denominator."

The most famous scene in the film involves a crazed Beale raging before the cameras and extolling his fictional audience to join him in protest: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore!"

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But it is protest without a clear objective. It is rage as an end in itself, not as the means to an end.

For Itzkoff, there is a clear resonance with today's political populism.

"That's part of what it was warning about. It was telling people there are no adults here, there's nobody at the top of the architecture calling balls and strikes and saying you're misbehaving and you can't do this.

"Once people start to loosen the guard rails there's just no going back for society, and that's applicable in a lot of different arenas."

Sorry, this audio has expired The real-life events that inspired 1984

A more complete vision of our present and future

Network has recently been revived as a stage play, featuring Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston in the main role.

It's just finished a season on Broadway after rave reviews and an award-winning stint in London.

Various stage versions of 1984 have also been popular over recent years, touring metropolitan and regional Australia.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the novel's publication. Its enduring success points to the strength of its writing and the importance of its message.

Alone, of course, it provides a powerful warning for contemporary society.

But combined with Brave New World and Network, it becomes part of a compendium of prescient fiction that not only questions the institutions and systems that govern our world, but also the role that we as individuals play in shaping our future.