Everyone has read 1984, and The Handmaid's Tale, and Brave New World in high school. Or if not there then in their freshman lit class. Therefore those books are

Everyone has read 1984, and The Handmaid's Tale, and Brave New World in high school. Or if not there then in their freshman lit class. Therefore those books are the yardsticks that all dystopian hot takes on current events must measure themselves against, no matter how nonsensical. Shakespeare had Ovid and Homer and the Bible to pull his references and allusions from, but our shared canon is considerably poorer.