Indeed, it is to science fiction, rather than to the more humane Utopias of the past, that we must look for the extremities of the totalitarian’s belief that, while nothing may be in itself meaningful, everything may be possible. He charily confides some of these suspicions to a friend of his-and then we learn that his fantasies are in fact true: his “friend” reports to the hidden controllers that the hero “is getting on to us.” Thereupon, the controllers contrive one night to make the hero’s city disappear when he wakes in the midst of nothingness, he realizes that his paranoia was all too realistic. If he meets a girl, this is because it has been arranged by the secret world-controllers who are playing with him. If he walks into a drug store and orders an ice-cream soda, neither the drug store nor the soda existed prior to his need of them. A science-fiction tale of some years back tells of a young man who gets the idea that the world he lives in is arranged especially for him.
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