There is a kind of dance that every new presidential administration feels the need to perform in its early days.

The new Biden administration says it must act quickly, and act with a flurry of executive orders, because the nation is experiencing not one, not two, not three, but four crises.

Why did the twentieth century produce so many—and such vivid—dystopias, works of fiction depicting not an ideal future but a future as terrible as could be imagined?