"Envy is forever looking upwards. It does not look sideways. In 'Facial Justice' Hartley (1960) describes a life after a catastrophic war. A Dictator has decreed that envy is so destructive that it has to be eliminated. The citizens are coerced to be as alike each other as possible. The worst crime is not envy itself but to excite envy. 'Equality and Envy - the two E's were...the positive and negative poles on which the New State rotated' (p.12). In order to exterminate envy everything that was enviable has been destroyed. Of course that in itself is the very essence of envy. Neither envy nor equality are spoken of as words but referred to as Good and Bad E. All tall buildings had been destroyed in the war except the tower of Ely Cathedral and none are allowed to be built - a horizontal view of life is required. No comparisons are to be made, women are encouraged to undertake an operation so they all looked alike, to be pretty would excite envy. The result is that the populace loses its humanity and becomes a non-thinking mass. The independently minded heroine, Jael, visits the Ely and looks up at the tower and leads a dance round it. She pays the price of having her more than averagely pretty face (an Alpha face) changed to a Beta face by cosmetic surgery and so made indistinguishable from the others." (From "Cronos and His Children - Envy and Reparation" by Mary Ashwin - Chapter II "Everyday Envy") The distinction between fiction and non-fiction became ever subtler in the "Underground" world of post-socialism, "After the Rain" of communism. In a lethal embrace, in an act of unprecedented intercourse, literature penetrated reality as only the most fervent lovers or the most avid haters do. A topsy-turvy continent adrift among the gales of newspeak, under the gaze of a million grey bureaucrats passing for big brothers. A motion picture gone awry: the plot long forgotten, the actors wondering forlornly on a dilapidated scene and the credits flashing over and again, in an endless loop. This crazed landscape, this party of mad hatters, where time stood still was the result of the two great equalizers: oppression and ideology. The substrate of numerous experiments of groups without control, the inhabitants of these feverish lands internalised their own predicament. The broken toys of spoiled imperial children, the guinea pigs of scientific materialism and then of materialism only - they strutted around, eyes wide shut, ears clogged, mouths stapled, lips sown with the wire of terror. Everyone was equal under their occupiers, their tormentors, and their slave masters. And everyone was equal by decree, on pain of death or exile, by the horror-stricken conviction called ideology. To succumb to the former was to survive - to subscribe to the latter was to flourish. Many flourished.