Genre
Utopian novels of Parry's era regularly advocated socialist solutions to the world's problems; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) was the most famous book of this type, though there were many more. Other authors, however, reacted against this literature of socialist advocacy; writers of more conservative and capitalist orientations wrote to counter the leftist tendency of utopians like Bellamy, and produced dystopias and works of satire. Parry cast his Scarlet Empire precisely in this satiric dystopian vein; he exploited the ancient story of Atlantis to portray his conception of the defects of a socialist state, which he termed "Social Democracy."
Read more about this topic: The Scarlet Empire
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“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)