George Orwell, the winner of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (2017), is the author of the award winning Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, communism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes.

Book Synopsis

• The year is 1984
• The world has fallen victim to perpetual war, government surveillance, and propaganda
• Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a totalitarian superstate named Oceania
• The Ruling Party employs the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking
• Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary, was created to limit the freedom of thought
• Personal identity, self-expression, free will—all threaten the ideology of the regime
• Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys a cult of personality despite the fact that he may not exist
• The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Party member
• Winston secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion
• He enters a forbidden relationship with a co-worker, Julia

Many terms used in the novel have entered common usage, including Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, prole, and memory hole. Nineteen Eighty-Four also popularised the adjective "Orwellian", connoting things such as official deception, secret surveillance, brazenly misleading terminology, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state.

Reviews

The New York Times: ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read

The Atlantic: 1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable.

The TIME magazine: “How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction.”

Common Sense Media: “Narrated with infinite precision, "1984" is one of the most famous dystopian satires in the English language.”

Awards and Nominations

Winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

The TIME magazine included it on its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

NPR included it in its Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

About the Author

Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism