Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Dalrymple reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel about a vast armada of destitute migrants heading for France while the West, paralyzed by guilt and propaganda, proves unable to resist. He argues that the novel’s portrait of spiritual exhaustion has proved uncomfortably prescient.
Dystopian novels are not predictions but projections: they imagine what the world will become if a current trend continues uninterrupted. The difference between prediction and projection is vital but often overlooked. The former is a call to fatalism, the latter a call to action.