![]() Exempt from this rigorous burning of the past was one man: the Receiver of Memory, a grizzled community elder charged with keeping all human experience from time immemorial catalogued inside his own understandably addled brain. The setting was an unnamed anywhere known only as “the community,” whose residents had achieved a post-Platonic, post-Marxist ideal of a classless, conflict-free (and, though not explicitly stated, seemingly race-free) society through the chemical suppression of emotion and the erasure of all suspect stimuli (including books, colors, weather, and sex) from the historical record. ![]() Originally published in 1993 (six years before “The Matrix”), Lowry’s novel was itself a patchwork of ideas borrowed from Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Jack Finney and Ray Bradbury in its depiction of totalitarian groupthink masquerading as peaceable utopia. ![]()
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