Here in the 2220s, young readers first heard the works of George Orwell. 1984 You can hardly imagine that it is a science fiction work. None of that would have happened in 1949, when the novel was first published, and the eponymous year would have sounded like a distant future. When the actual 1980s arrived, it still evoked visions of a techno-totalitarian dystopia to come. “The 1984 Phobia has penetrated so thoroughly into the consciousness of many people who have never read the book and know nothing about its contents, that some wonder what will happen to us after December 31, 1984.” Isaac Asimov wrote in 1980. “When New Year’s Day 1985 arrives and the United States still exists and faces many of the problems it faces today, how do we express our anxiety about every aspect of life?”
The reason for this was one of the series A syndicated newspaper column that Asimov probably published every New Year. at dawn 1984the syndicate asked him to reimagine Orwell’s novel. Orwell’s novel had already been a common cultural reference for decades. As a work of science fiction (a genre for which his own name has virtually become synonymous), he finds it lacking, to say the least. “London, the setting of this story, was not so much moved 35 years ago, from 1949 to 1984, as it was moved 1,000 miles east in space to Moscow,” he writes. In Asimov’s view, Orwell, far from trying to imagine a future, merely transformed the England he knew into a miserable Stalinist state. Aside from certain incredible surveillance systems, the setting is “incredibly outdated compared to the real world of the 1980s.”
Orwell does not even think to imagine new vices. “All his characters are gin hounds and tobacco addicts,” Asimov writes, “and one of the horrors of his 1984 pictures is how eloquently they depict the poor quality of gin and tobacco.” Its details suggest that it was one of Orwell’s major sources of inspiration. It was the British Ministry of Information, his wife’s employer during World War II, and the source of material he broadcast to India while working for the BBC around the same time. According to his letter, the department’s cafeterias were not of the highest standard. What’s more, the 850 words of “basic English” they insisted on using on air are quite similar. nineteen fourNewspeak is a concise language developed and mandated by governments to limit the scope of public thought.
Asimov doesn’t support it either. “There is no indication that this compression of language has weakened it as a mode of expression,” he writes. “Political obfuscation, in fact, tends to use more words rather than fewer, longer words rather than shorter ones, and expansion rather than contraction.” (This is true, of course.) That’s what Orwell knew. ) anything 1984Asimov, while pointing out Orwell’s shortcomings as a prophetic, science fiction, or literary work, believes that Orwell possesses a certain geopolitical knowledge. The three countries that dominate the world, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, “correspond very loosely to the three actual superpowers of the 1980s: the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.” Orwell knew, as many did not, that the latter two would never join forces. Perhaps it’s because of his own frustrating experience fighting for leftist causes prone to sectarianism. But even someone as forward-thinking as Asimov could not have predicted that just a few years later the Soviet Union would be out of the game – and decades later, the word orwellian China is where it is most commonly applied.
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George Orwell’s disastrous finish race 1984 before his death
Isaac Asimov predicted in 1964 what the world would be like in 2014
Ridley Scott talks about the making of Apple’s iconic ‘1984’ commercial, which aired on Super Bowl Sunday in 1984
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
