Brave New World Dystopianism and 1984 Dystopianism

I'm reading a dystopian novel right now, and it's got me thinking of two different sorts of dystopianism; Brave New World dystopianism and 1984 dystopianism. 

Both novels are masterpieces, of course. I read Brave New World when I was very young (maybe even pre-teen). Although I've never re-read it, many aspects of it have stuck with me. I didn't read 1984 until my twenties, but I've read it several times since. In purely literary terms, I think it's a much better work-- perhaps even the novel of the century after Lord of the Rings, in my view. And I've seen the Peter Cushing film version (also a classic) at least twice.

1984 is, of course, a self-conscious response to Brave New World, and they could be contrasted in many ways. But right now I'm thinking of a particular contrast: the contrast between a dystopia that works all too well, and is horrifying for that reason, and a dsytopia that doesn't work at all, and is horrifying for that reason.

My contrast could be argued with. You could say, rightly enough, that the dsytopia in 1984 does indeed work; that it works perfectly in the way the Party intends it. I concede that. But still, the Party is lying to its people, while the World State of Brave New World doesn't lie to its people (as far as I can remember). It delivers a degrading happiness and a techno-utopia, while the society of 1984 is decaying in every way, including scientifically.

In other words, it's a society that's gone horribly right, and a society that's gone horribly wrong-- to borrow terms from the website TV Tropes.

Although I prefer 1984 to Brave New World, I've always been braced for a Brave New World dystopia rather than an Orwellian one.

For instance, opponents of the European Union often say that the project is doomed to failure because you can't yoke so many different cultures and economies together. But my fear is that the EU will work, that it will go horribly right; that the free movement of peoples and all the other homogenizing tendencies within the EU will indeed erode the languages, cultures, and customs of the individual nations.

Similarly, my fear with artificial intelligence is that it will achieve all the things its champions predict it will. (Although my fear of this has rather diminished recently, since there seems to be widespread acceptance that it's already plateaud-- for now. My fear of the this long predated the current surge of AI, when I read an article by Alan Turing insisting that machines could become intelligent. He should know, I thought.)

I realize this is a difference of temperament rather than an intellectual one.

As a bit of a postcript, Brave New World was actually my very first encounter with the magic of Shakespeare's language. A few Shakespearean quotations used in it captivated me. I've wondered since whether this is because of their inherent beauty of because they came with Shakespeare's prestige, or both.

The first and most powerful is from King Lear: "The wheel has come full circle; I am here". The drama of that still fires my imagination.

And then there are these lines, quoted from The Tempest: "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will play about my ears, and sometimes voices."

And of course, the line from The Tempest which gives it its title: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in't!".

I've always said The Tempest is my favourite Shakespeare play, although I feel a bit pretentious saying it, since I've never even seen a film version, and I've only read it a few times. It's the atmosphere as much as anything else-- and the received idea of the great magus, Shakespeare, breaking his dramatic staff in the peae an