h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You make a common mistake about the book "1984". The date was fairly irrelevant, in fact I have heard that it was a joke, based on when Orwell wrote the book (1948 last two digits changed). Orwell wasn't actually saying "In 1984 the world will be like this" he simply chose that year to represent "the future" and based his ideas on a perfect totalitarian society. It wasn't a prediction about what the year 1984 would be like and so the fact that the year has passed is irrelevant to the book's message.

What can I say?... sorry. But isn't that one of the joys of literature, in that meaning can be gained as time progresses? Take something like "The Taming of the Shrew" - I doubt that Shakespeare had particular feminist leanings, but does that discredit such readings of the play?

Em

PS. Thanks by the way - I never knew that about the date joke thing. But you can tell that, can't you?

It's OK, I just wanted to set the record straight. I hear the "The novel 1984, now past it's sell-by date" stuff a lot, often from people who should know better, and it bugs me

I disagree with you're opinion that the date '1984' is irrelevant. 1984 is supposed to symbolise 1948, and the dangers of the onset of communism.
intrepidexplorer.

In Nineteen Eighty Four Orwell attacks totalitarianism and warns that even democratic governments, if they desire power, it can deprive people of all basic freedoms. The novel is based on the experiences of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; however it is set in Britain to suggest that it could occur elsewhere, and to add to the overall satirical nature of the text. In other words, Orwell was simply mocking the principles of socialism and post war Britain at the same time.
It is not at all a prediction, those who think otherwise have misunderstood the meaning of the text.

aznpoison
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It wasn't a prediction, because it was already happening, but it could have been a prediction, because it is happening now.

If you read Douglas Adam's p.s. on here (U42 i think) then you'll see that he didn't mean for HitchHikers Guide to be any kind of prediction, but some of what he writes has happened: ie the Internet, though if you read his site, he puts it a lot better than me!
GB

1984 isn't about Nazi Germany or The Soviet Union. It's about post-war Britain. Its cheap gin, bad cigarettes and ersatz food. How they had allied themselves with one power agains't another in a destructive war only to swap sides and enter another (The Cold War) against their former allies, angry that the Americans had not packed up their weapons and gone home. The destruction of personal freedoms not restored after the end of the War. The erosion of a British culture in exchange for that of an American - hence Airstrip 1.
A highly tubercular Orwell had gone to live in the Scotttish Islands for his lungs, but he'd begun to tire of city and intellectual life, the backbiting and empty challenges. Orwell was an old school Englishman, socialists often are, and this was his riposte to the death of Old England

I think that's only partly true. Orwell was certainly something of a "little englander" and he resented the fact that Britain had fallen under the thumb of a superpower (ironically, Churchill had wanted to go to war with Germany in order to prevent this happening. He felt it was obscene that Britain should exist with the "permission" of Germany. In the immediate post-war years, Orwell evidently felt that Britain had become a vassal of the USA). However, the key points of the book were his libertarian-left beliefs, his hatred of authoritarian and totalitarian ideas in politics and society and a warning to the British left that they had abandoned their traditional ideas about "liberty" and been seduced by the strong-arm left-wing politics of Stalin and may one day pay a heavy price for that.

Exactly what I was trying to say

You are right about one thing, he was one of the few left-wing intellectuals to denounce Stalin. The only other two who I can think of were Bertrand Russell and Albert Camus. Now there's a couple of people who could det this site alite

Peter's Vardy and SInger would be quite good too: as well as having the advantage of still being alive...

Still, with all the terrorism laws, it's certainly a topical book.

What were those nasty missiles they launched at each other called? Shades of the anthrax scare...

-Martin

Can't believe the election results - now I'm *deeply* scared.

Me too!!

I see 1984 all around us!

the 1984 title apparently came from the fact that he wrote the novel in 1948; he couldn't call it that for obvious reasons, so he changed the numbers round instead.

The reason Orwell swited the last two digits of the year he wrote the book, was to say it was a parody on what was happening RIGHT THEN AND THERE. Shortly after that, Eisinhower warned about the power of the "military-industrial complex" and was ignored.

How many '60's rebels actually know it was Eisenhower, the symbol of the Establishment itself, that coined the phrase?

Now we have so-called "news" which is better called "infotainment". Spiffy graphics scary catch-phrase headlines, and no substance. Did anyone notice that Katy Kouric's debut was basically as a shill for the Bush administration? Did anyone dare to say so if they did?

With the Patriot Act (a decendant of the Alien and Sedsition acts of 1789, the Civil War, and 1917 - all of which eventually got slapped down by the Supreme Court) - we are decending into the pit for real now. And Bush is packing the Court (On this side of the pond, those phrases probably mean more than in Airstrip One - oops - I mean Great Britian).

There are two opposing forces at work in the world today. Massachusetts actually allows gay people to marry, and according to the Dali Lama., for the first time ever over 50% of the world's population live in something resmbling a democracy.

But the brainwashing of the public continues at a frantic pace, and it's hard to know which way it'll turn.

There was a movie with Richard Burton of 1984 which used period sets - 1940's period sets. Were they trying to say something?

If I come back a thousand years from now, I hope to be rididng a Bussard ramjet to the stars. But I'm afraid I'd be just as likely to
be a drone in a grim, opressive regime.

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK!