1984

1984
by George Orwell
read: approximately 1996
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #13, Guardian 1000 Novels

Several years after Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he wrote Brave New World Revisited.  It sounds like a sequel, but it's really a non-fiction follow-up, where he discusses the ways in the which the world is moving towards the world he outlined in Brave New World and how his book predicts some technological and societal changes.  He also spends a good number of pages comparing and contrasting Brave New World and 1984.  So it was probably unfortunate that I read both Brave New World and Brave New World Revsited before 1984; I was pre-disposed to think, "Sure, that's great, but it's no Brave New World."

I did like 1984, though I read it so long ago that many of the specifics are lost to me.  I think the post-World War II fear of Stalinist Russia is hard for me to understand.  The madmen of today are local in scope; Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong-Il might torture or murder their own populace, but there's no serious danger that their monstrosity will spread across the globe.  But in 1948, just a couple years after Hitler was defeated, it probably seemed inevitable that Stalin would make his own effort to take over the world.  Now the idea seems fanciful, like something out of a James Bond movie.  To 16-year-old me, 1984 was a great work of fiction, but its political impact was a bit lost on me.