RE: Nineteen-Eighty-Four
May 30, 2012 at 2:15 pm
(This post was last modified: May 30, 2012 at 2:23 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Hehehe, I love it when i get the opportunity to blather on about this book. Orwell wasn't making any predictions. The sci-fi elements were added as a theme. He didn't predict a surveillance society, he felt that such a society already existed, and the best way for him to emphasize that was to paint a narrative where people could be watched directly at all times. Interesting to note that it wasn't actually the Soviet Union (though he drew upon it's lingo as a shortcut to menace..if you will) upon which this society was based, but the UK during wartime. It would seem that Mr Orwell didn't see much difference between what group of people might be intentionally misleading whatever other group of people for whatever reason- ie, it wasn't kosher to do this sort of thing even if the idea was to "fight communism/facism". Another interesting thing to note is that JFK's famous "last speech" ( the one he never delivered) echoes this sentiment in that the text would seem to question the value of becoming a cruel mirror image of the type of society you are trying to defend against in the course of setting yourself up as a bulwark against it. What good is it to fight facism/communism-what-have-you if you become interchangeable with your "enemies" in the process? Of course he got shot, and many a conspiracy theory finds it's origins in this text. In any case, the true value of this book was not that it was a prophetic sort of sci-fi (ala Jules Verne) but that it's predictions failed to pan out (as Orwell himself noted). It allowed us a glimpse into what we could be-at our very worst-and we went another way with it. Nevertheless, surveillance technology did progress to the point at which 1984 is a thing of the past (they have better ways to watch you now). On the other hand, as far as "prophetic sci-fi" is concerned, nothing in 1984 was so far beyond the scope of technology (even in his own lifetime) that it would be surprising to see it actualized. I like to think thaty this was his intention..to imagine a society that is only slightly different from our own, with technology that could appear "in the not-so-distant-future" in order to manufacture a sense of palpable dread due to the plausibility of the narrative.
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