The view ahead through the windscreen

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Most literary versions of the remote future are dystopias; they are not, of course, really about the remote future at all, but quite openly about the author’s own society in exaggerated garb. The Time Machine is about the division between the effete rich of Wells’s day and the urban lower classes riding the Underground. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in texture, all about the privations of 1948. Brave New World is about the rise of cheap popular mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Will Self’s impressive new book presents, in a way, a pure portrait of the imagined future. Even though his future society is mostly extrapolated from a fragment of our society —- a most peculiar one — there is not much sense of satire being brought to bear on the present day. It’s only doubtfully a dystopia at all — indeed, much of the imagined future has an idyllic, even a pastoral air.