It seems a bit rough to accuse modern Britain of being a dystopia when it's also such an excellent source of tea, roast dinners and well-tailored clothing. But then the really disturbing thing about any dystopia is that for every Winston Smith resisting the machine, there are thousands of content consumers quite happy with Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most influential dystopia of the 20th century, but George Orwell's vision of Britain as totalitarian state was, thankfully, not quite accurate. Our mid-level bureaucrats are more likely to face early redundancy for their thought crimes than Room 101. And it's not like we're engaged in an endless war against an unspecified enemy in the name of which our basic rights are stripped away. Oh. Wait.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has always been the hipper vision of dystopia. A nice job in the corporate hierarchy, unlimited psychotropic drugs and no-strings-attached sex. Worryingly, Huxley's satirical novel reads more like a handbook for a career in the creative industries than a dystopian warning today. And Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 doesn't fare much better. As Bradbury himself said, you don't have to burn books to destroy culture, just stop people reading them. And with libraries closing all over the country, we might start to wonder how much time remains to our culture.

Granted we aren't making our young people fight, Hunger Games-style, to the death – just yet. But there's still something unnervingly familiar about the adventures of Katniss Everdeen as penned by Suzanne Collins. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find that desperate X-Factor producers have considered gladiatorial death-matches in the face of plummeting ratings. Stephen King's The Long Walk sees bands of young men force-marched across America at gunpoint for cheering television audiences. I don't want to be guilty of putting ideas in to the tiny bald head of Ian Duncan Smith, but if he isn't already considering this as a replacement for Jobseekers' Allowance, it's surely only a matter of time.

Dystopian visions used to present dire warnings of futures to come, now they seem more like pale reflections of reality. Today dystopia is just another category of light entertainment, a marketing niche for ebooks which even has its own channel on Netflix. Is this because we no longer have anything to fear? Or have our dystopian nightmares simply become reality?