Has Dystopia Become Reality? Why Are Libraries Being Emptied at Midnight in 2026?Can Ideas Be Censored?
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What Is a Dystopian Novel?
A dystopia is usually a dark, imaginary future ruled by an oppressive government, strict social control, censorship, and the destruction of human nature. When George Orwell wrote 1984, could he have imagined that one day the dark world he described might become real, with books being removed from library shelves?
The book banning crisis that began in Canada in May 2025, when the Alberta government announced new library standards, reached a peak on January 5, 2026, when official bans came into effect. Recent developments in Canada and the United States have started to look like something out of a dystopian novel. Under pressure from governments and political groups, thousands of banned books are quietly being removed from shelves and, in some cases, destroyed.
Can we think whatever we want?
I suppose we can, as long as we keep our thoughts inside that closed box we call the mind. But what happens when those thoughts leave our minds through our pens, without passing through a filter of censorship?
For centuries, ideas that someone did not like could lead to punishment, prosecution, or banning. Because some people want to decide whose voice should be heard, whose voice should remain silent, and how certain voices should be allowed to speak.
Months ago, I wrote about how artificial intelligence disturbed me in one particular way: I felt that it could kill creativity. In my previous article, I also wrote about books being collected by artificial intelligence companies, their contents being scanned and transferred into AI systems, and the books then being destroyed.
What frightened me most was the possibility that this could be the beginning of a future in which our access to information is limited to what artificial intelligence chooses to give us.
Imagine a person entering a library, getting lost among the books, moving from one piece of information to another, doing research, making connections, and reaching their own conclusions.
Now imagine a guard standing at the library door asking:
“What are you looking for?”
You answer:
“This information.”
The guard says:
“Here you are. Take it and go. That’s all. There is no need for a library. You can have only the information I give you.”
And while all of this may sound far away, it seems that these developments are not as distant as we might think. While looking through the news online, I came across the following report.
From Library Shelves to a Blacklist: Book Censorship in Libraries
The Height of Irony: Masterpieces such as 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, which criticize censorship and dictatorship, have themselves become some of the first books removed from school libraries because of their so-called “inappropriate content.”
Pressure of New Laws in Canada: In Alberta, during August and September 2025, school boards in Edmonton and Calgary announced that they would remove more than 200 classic books from their shelves. The story received widespread international attention.
Secret Storage Rooms Revealed: By March and April 2026, official documents obtained through freedom-of-information laws reportedly revealed that schools had quietly moved more than 1,000 graphic versions of classic books—comic-book adaptations—into storage rooms.
In the United States, the number of banned books reached record levels, and the content of literature classes was changed in thousands of schools.
The Most Frequently Banned Books: Protecting Goodness While Burning Freedom
In this new wave of dystopian censorship, the first victims have, ironically, been books that criticize totalitarian governments and social injustice.
Here are three works that are now among the most widely banned books in the world and are being kept away from readers in libraries in Canada and the United States.
1984 – George Orwell
In this timeless novel, Orwell describes how a totalitarian state can control the human mind, language, and history through fear, mass surveillance—the “Big Brother”—and manipulation.
Through “Newspeak,” a language designed to eliminate words, and the “Ministry of Truth,” which rewrites history every day, Orwell gives us a universal warning about how those in power can turn society into slaves.
How tragic it is that today this very novel is being censored on the grounds that it “manipulates young minds” and is being thrown into the very “memory hole” that it warned us about.
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
This powerful work of Canadian literature examines women’s rights and religious oppression through a dystopian story.
Yet it has been removed from some school libraries by conservative groups because of its references to sexuality and its “excessively pessimistic” view of society.
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Although it is one of the greatest classics ever written about racism and injustice, the book has been removed from shelves because its strong historical language and portrayal of social realities have been considered “disturbing.”
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the firefighters whose job was to burn books belonged to a fictional world.
Today, however, those firefighters seem to have stepped into the real world, arriving at library doors with legal orders and political lists.
Every ban introduced in the name of “protecting young people” can, in reality, deprive them of the opportunity to question, criticize, and think freely.
At the height of the digital age, emptying libraries in this way—the oldest fortresses of knowledge—is one of the clearest signs of social regression.
The information in this article has been gathered from publicly accessible sources on the internet.
Stay with books. Reading is a beautiful thing.
Rahel Çela Behar
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