In 1949, Comrade Eric Blair's horrific vision of a dystopic future society, The Last Man In Europe, is published in the Soviet States of America, where he had settled after fighting in the Canadian Civil War on the Socialist side. Although it was hailed as a masterpiece by American literary critics, the reactionaries of the European monarchies made arguments that the novel's dictatorship could as easily be based on certain aspects of life in Soviet America. Since Comrade Blair himself dismissed these speculations as 'wishful thinking,' it is still read widely in the SSA, and serves a vital social purpose: when a society begins to enact measures that might make it resemble the fictional Oceania, it quickly comes under attack as Last Man-like, and most such measures have failed because of the novel's impact.