Political Dystopian

Technological advancement is now carefully planned, and the concept of individuality has been eliminated. A young man known as Equality 7-2521 rebels by doing secret scientific research. When his activity is discovered, he flees into the wilderness with the girl he loves. Together, they plan to establish a new society based on rediscovered individualism.

The story takes place almost entirely inside a priest's confessional office. Chapters alternate between a psychiatrist giving her confessions to the priest and the confessions of the very patients mentioned by the psychiatrist in her sessions. Every sentence that is written in the past tense is spoken aloud to the priest or by her, and every sentence that is written in the present tense is one of the priest's thoughts or an action she experiences.

The classic dystopian novella, Anthem, is one of the earliest books to explore a theme which has become a standard motif in science fiction literature: the search for individualistic expression in a repressive and rigorously organized society.

October 15, 2016: Hillary died in her sleep today. I was smoking a fat Cohiba when I heard the news. We were still talking about Hillary a couple hours later when we heard a rumbling and went outside to West Broadway. A great throng of Bernies was moving toward us from Prince Street. The crowd grew as we watched, swollen by new Bernies as it moved. An ad hoc Bernie rally. Someone carried a large effigy of Bernie’s hoary head before it. I saw something red and realized it was a red flag, the universal banner of revolution, unfurled by revolutionaries since the Middle Ages.