On my way to lunch today, I, for no reason whatsoever, became obsessed with whether it was 1984 or Brave New World that had the lottery as an opiate of the masses.

I asked my lunch companions, and they were pretty much split down the middle, as no one had read either in many years. One of my companions, a 6’4″ or 6’5″ programmer with long hippy hair was pretty sure it was Brave New World, because he had been in a staged reading of 1984 as the Voice of the Screen, and he didn’t remember any mention of a lottery.

So, literate types, which was it?