EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Exactly. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World were never meant to be tales that hold up to a standard of "this, exactly as depicted, could actually happen to your real country in 40 years." They were meant to be shocking, plausible, and ignoring the little details like how it came to be. And in context this wasn't weird or ridiculous; it was part of the genre that inspired it, utopian fiction, where the Greek pun is that the author wants to talk about eutopia (good-place) but instead talks about utopia (no-place, e.g. a place that doesn't, or can't, exist), with Thomas More's Utopia being the ur-example very intentionally invoking this and other puns and wordplay (like the river Anyder, meaning "no-water.")
Of course, nowadays, we expect there to be more rigor about how and why the dystopia comes into being. The stark "scare 'em straight" warning isn't enough anymore. Which shouldn't surprise anyone either, for many reasons (desensitization, distance from atrocities and horrors in either time or space or both, increasing radicalization, etc.) You would probably see something similar in nuclear fiction if the various arms limitation treaties hadn't passed, with people having to be more specific about how and why the nuclear apocalypse happened rather than leaving it completely unexplained as in stories like There Will Come Soft Rains.
Brave New World was required reading in my high school, and was a key part of the essay question on my SAT (specifically the question was about the Ford quote "history is bunk" and what effects remembering, forgetting, or rewriting history has on society. I compared and contrasted the two books, and Animal Farm as well, since its inability to preserve the intent and value of its rules was a major part of its undoing, as the animals couldn't stop the pigs from rewriting their history.) I graduated in the mid-2000s. That reading list had been in place since at least 2001.
And I would still say Nineteen Eighty-Four is still relevant, in part because it shows the guts of the propaganda machine, and the exploitation of ordinary folks' emotional responses in order to maintain fervor and obedience. Brave New World leans too heavily into the "everyone can be blissed out all the time" angle. It was quite prescient in terms of the potential for biological engineering (consisting, as it did, of technologies that completely predate genetic engineering) and of a somewhat "softer," more plush, "friendly" totalitarianism/exploitation. But you can't tell me that the Two Minutes' Hate is less realistic than getting everyone to (exclusively) safely use psychologically-addictive compounds with lethal overdose potential in a world where opioid addiction is a crippling problem and Fox News exists. Because, remember, that's what kills Linda (the mother of John the "Savage," who had gotten disconnected from the engineered society she came from); she overdoses on soma because she's full of shame over having actually given birth to John and regret over not having the socialite life she's supposed to have.
Both books remain relevant. One shows us a more gentle/plausible approach, though BNW still features the classic "handwave the origin" non-explanation you see in most dystopian fiction, with Mond making some airy-fairy comments about gassing museums and other horrific terrorist attacks that apparently just eventually succeeded at making people obedient and neglectful. The other shows a far less plausible approach, but one that emphasizes various tools and techniques that are absolutely real and require our attention today (consider the very recent rise of the term "alternative facts," or the exploitation of the phrase "fake news" to discredit any and all reports which might make someone look bad.) And both books fail to touch on things that should be part of any techno-dystopia fiction today, like people willingly giving away some of their deepest innermost secrets in order to have an easier time posting photos to the Internet, or companies using horrifically predatory, calculated psychological manipulation in order to get people (particularly children) to spend more money on their mobile games. (Perhaps It can't happen here touches on these, I haven't read that one, or at least I don't remember doing so. It would be remarkably, I'd say shockingly prescient if it did so, given how few people predicted the incredible rise and influence the Internet would have. Reading a synopsis doesn't suggest this, though it has other prescient bits, e.g. "strong-man with big, empty promises" leaders, thinking of semi-recent US leadership as well Putin's invasion of Ukraine.)
Sure. But if most people haven't heard of them, they aren't going to have impact. That's the problem. That's why "man on the street" opinions are useful. (For an appropriate choice of street, anyway.) They tell you what has gotten a broad foothold. Broad footholds aren't the end-all, be-all, as demonstrated by dragonborn; new developments happen. But, and this is the really unfortunate thing, you can cite names and works until Kingdom come, if they aren't widely-known, they aren't going to have impact right now. They might develop impact over time. Or they might fade into total obscurity. Almost everyone knows about Tarzan, and has read (or, more likely, seen) some version of that story, and even parodies thereof (e.g. George of the Jungle.) How many know of Pellucidar, despite that series being written by the same author, Edgar Rice Burroughs? (One book apparently even features a Tarzan crossover!) Everyone knows Shakespeare, his common plays are everywhere (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Richard III, MacBeth, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, etc., all of which I read in high school), but his uncommon plays have almost no cultural impact today, e.g. Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, or Titus Andronicus (the last of which is rarely performed today due to featuring...things that genuinely warranr trigger warnings, though the play was very popular in Shakespeare's lifetime.)
I sincerely hope that the (quite substantial) list of works you've mentioned that feature well-written gnomes becomes more popular, gains more traction, and rehabilitates them conceptually and mechanically for D&D play. That would be genuinely great. But, at least for the time being, you're going to be struggling against the massive headwind of World of Warcraft and other, widely-known, influential works in the fantasy-gaming space that use the crappy, Flanderized version of gnomes. That is not a knock against gnomes in the absolute; it is a pragmatic recognition that there is a gap between what you want to see and what is actually plausible in the short term.
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