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""Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere."
The year is 1984; the scene is London, largest population center of Airstrip One.
Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia. Winston Smith knows this, because his work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant "correction" of such records. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. He knows the Party's official image of the world is a fluid fiction. He knows the Party controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing their imaginations through a process of bewilderment and brutalization that alienates each individual from his fellows and deprives him of every liberating human pursuit from reasoned inquiry to sexual passion. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Newspeak, doublethink, thought crime--in 1984, George Orwell created a whole vocabulary of words concerning totalitarian control that have since passed into our common vocabulary. More importantly, he has portrayed a chillingly credible dystopia. In our deeply anxious world, the seeds of unthinking conformity are everywhere in evidence; and Big Brother is always looking for his chance. " Amazon.com Editorial Review
"...This book is a historical masterpiece. The characters, the setting, the message, still ring true today. Individualism is crushed in this books world; humans become like insects, and think with a hive mind. The doctrine that the people of this world chant like a mantra are all basic contradictions, such as, "War is peace". Putting the mind in a double bind where normal thought is paralyzed. A lot of people say that we are moving forward towards the 1984 world. I agree in a sense but we are going about it in a subtle different way. Such as the current cry for everything in the name of safety, really, Can you ever be safe enough? Therefore any law could effectively get passed in the name of safety, or battling terrorists or global warming, or equal rights, or etc infinitum. We have to remember to use common sense when something is presented as truth. Further we must be careful and ever vigilant when it comes to human rights and freedom of speech, and learn the lessons that Orwell tried to teach us." Killerwokz Review at Amazon.com
