A mere 1,000 miles.
932 miles is a short hop?
Because the prompt was explicitly inspired by Brave New World, which didn’t have gulags.
“Unpleasant” yet “able to sustain” is sort of like saying that you want a lemon cheap car that’s very reliable.
Yeah, that. Pleasant or not, there are no places on Earth that can sustain millions of people that aren’t already occupied by millions of people.
I think Sicily, Greenland or Nicaragua would be perfect penal colonies in a scenario like this.
Australia worked well for this the first time around.
Maybe Tasmania?
It is isolated enough, being an island of its own, yet close enough to a major populated area (Australia) that the regime could keep close tabs on it.
No, it was written before that. It’s implied that World State is using “the islands” as an escape valve fortheupper castes. Exiling dissents means the World State can still draw on their talents if they face an out of context problem. The World State has a population of 2 billion. If say only 1% are Alphas that’s only 20 million. Assume Betas wre eligible and make up another 5% that’s another 100 million. So exiles are drawn from a pool of only around 120 million, all of whom have been selectively bred and conditioned since before they were even decanted to conform to their assigned role. Dissidents and malcontents also have the option of just going on a permanent Soma holiday like Linda and Tomakin. There will never be enough exiles for a regime that has the resources and control of an entire planet to have trouble finding room for.
I know it was written before the German Holocaust happened. I was wondering if he spoke about that Holocaust at all.
Going to Sicily is by no means a punishment. And you could literally swim to mainland Italy.
There would be measures in place to stop this from happening.
In the novel it is made abundantly clear (by Mustapha Mond himself, the World Coordinator, no less) that the government in “Brave New World” would not flinch at exterminating dissidents if it was not feasible to send them away. Yes, having a pool of inquisitive and “maladjusted” individuals can be convenient in case society ever meets a truly “outside problem”… but that would go by the wayside if it were not possible to have a place to keep dissidents away from society (ironically, Mustapha Mond himself was one of the “dissidents” himself, but the powers that be saw his potential and offered him the choice of exile or becoming one of the leaders, with the understanding that he would leave behind his “dissident-ness” and apply his mind and skills to keep society going).
Here is a scan of the relevant passage of the book (towards the end, when Mustapha Mond sentences Helmholtz and Bernard to banishment and later has a philosophical conversation with “Mr. Savage”):
For something written in 1931, it is eerily and creepily prescient in indicating that the government would get rid of “undesirables” by means of what sounds very much like a gas chamber…
Seems to me that any place habitable enough to support a decent sized population of criminals would be economically valuable. Too valuable for a government to “waste” on mere punishment like that (outside of slave labor, perhaps, which is what Australia originally was for). Any place not economically valuable in that sense would simply be a death sentence, with extra steps.
But there’s lots of places that are economically marginal. They can be made livable with some minor investments, but probably can’t produce enough economic value to be worth that investment without some other, external motivation, like a colony for political prisoners. The key is finding such a marginal place, that is also relatively secure without constant, large-scale interventions. An isolated island works well for that, which is why lots of people are suggesting them.
It sends them underground, of course. To the mines and the machinery, never to come up again, not them, nor their children, nor their children’s children.
A nuclear war would create more options. The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaids Tale sent troublemakers to clean up nuclear waste in ‘the colonies’.
Probably to “a nice big farm upstate.”