> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is
typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said
and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is
always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is
only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to
have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts,
and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.
Dictators are absolutely terrified of the paper trail. This is the entire reason for existence of the Great Firewall. The CCP invests heavily in sanitizing imported literature and curating the information supply to maintain cognitive capture over the populace.
We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look at the library purges in conservative states and the push to co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental substrate of free speech.
Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a different one. We use justifications which make sense to us that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything. Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.
Asimov in 1980 didn't have access to "Orwell, the Lost Writings", published in 1985. That details Eric Blair's ("Orwell" is a pseudonym) jobs during WWII, mostly at the British Ministry of Information. "1984"'s details are partly autobiographical. One of Blair's jobs was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English for broadcast to the colonies, primarily India and Hong Kong. He found that this was a political act. Squeezing news down to a 1000 word vocabulary required removing political ambiguity. It's hard to prevaricate in Basic English, which has a very concrete vocabulary. Hence Newspeak.
The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B", and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin, cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.
"1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.
I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every mobile phone and 3D printer.
One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.
Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.
>Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report
on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work
well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be
abandoned.
Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.
And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary social classes which are perhaps closer to “1984” because they are so well established now.
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
> Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.
> Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological
advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib
into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because
of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with
a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.
> Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into
use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell
describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched'
with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If
you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they
scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
> This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that
never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he
didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
>Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening
of the feminine stereotype of 1949.
This is funny for me. The most common type of criticize for Asimov's work is that people complain Asimov did not add enough women in his book. The world is changing so quickly.
I enjoyed reading "Foundation" recently. The total lack of female characters was jarring to say the least. Worth the read if you haven't. Not much like the AppleTV series.
I love Asimov for the same reason I love Orwell, namely clear 1940s-style writing (which I've also seen in Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight), so I find it funny and sad that one is criticizing the other.
>Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in being. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)
>In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-free as compared with the decades before it. There have been local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources. That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.
...
>He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.
I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan rhyming with Orwell a bit.
And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.
The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats needing to direct the anger of the populace away from themselves. We have this today with government propaganda stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy insecurity from the oil crisis of the time.
We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.
Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought that was mostly a leftist problem.
I loved the Foundation series and Isaac Asimov was definitely my most read science fiction author as a kid, but damn - my estimation of Asimov as a man just fuckin plummeted. He comes across like a whiny nerd. He's upset that 1984 gets such acclaim in "his" area of expertise, science fiction. And how dare this non science fiction guy step foot in his domain. If 1984 weren't set in the future, he wouldn't have any gripes with it, I'm sure.
The one thing Asimov gives Orwell credit for is predicting that there would be three separate great powers? Like, what? The other nations don't matter at all. We're not even sure they really exist or not. Or how he complains that Orwell used a missile strike, instead of calling it what, a 2X00 Plasma Fueled Missile Strike? It's not about the missile strike. It's about the fear the missile strike incites into people. People afraid are easy to control.
Or about how the warring nations didn't use nukes. Like, there's no way Asimov didn't understand that it was probably not even the other nations that were responsible, but rather the party itself, right? But that's what it sounds like. It reminds me of how in the Foundation series, one of the characters has an "atomic" wristwatch. Like, you can tell that Asimov thought that would be possible in the future and would be cool, and just had to include it. But really, who cares. As if cool gadgets or what people might use in the future is what makes or breaks science fiction. Not to mention how outdated an atomic watch feels now.
Asimov had great ideas, but his actual writing ability doesn't hold a candle to George Orwell's. Orwell was a true literary master. Asimov was a very creative scientist, with a lot of ideas in his head, and he successfully put them to paper.
> He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Asimov refuses to concede that Orwell beat him at his game. The book is not about predicting future gadgets but societal patterns and operating models.
> This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
This is such a core misunderstanding that Asimov seems to have, and it kind of kills his entire analysis for me.
The assumption is that only some small fraction of a fraction of the people who could be surveilled at any time are being surveilled.
The crux of the thing is that everyone COULD be under surveillance at any time, so in effect everyone must behave as if they are being observed because they do not know they are not.
"1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" —Cereal Killer, Hackers, whose words ring even more true today even as we watch tech billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god in silico
Right before that, he says, "FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day." Whenever I rewatch that movie, I think 17 is a tiny number compared to today. Probably 17,000+ now.
It's been many years since I read 1984, but this seems wrong:
"To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor
fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever
increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother."
Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there was no central dictator, just the system.
I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing exactly the same thing right now.
Amusingly, when he writes
> Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
I wonder what he’d think of the Stasi, which had a network of informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.
Also, when he wrote
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don’t know when someone is looking was chilling. I’m not sure that would be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.
And, finally:
> George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in
a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Science fiction does not forecast. FFS. Even him surely could not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute totalitarian government with just enough technology to be dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on 1984 for not being sciencey enough.
Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.
I think Asimov is right that 1984 was not intended as a forecast but rather a depiction of Stalinism with British characteristics, so to speak.
>In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad
science fiction.
Based on this quote and others, it seems Asimov didn't believe that Orwell intended the novel as science fiction, although others categorize it that way. I would say he's attacking the interpretation of it as science fiction, but it veers into an attack on Orwell, which is unfortunate.
You write
>Science fiction does not _forecast_.
Not to be overly pedantic but to be fair to Asimov, he didn't exactly say science fiction _necessarily_ does that, but rather it's a knack related to science fiction.
” As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use many words
rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to
reduce. Every leader of inadequate education or limited intelligence hides
behind exuberant inebriation of loquacity.”
> those controlling the government kept themselves in power bybrute force, by distorting the truth, by continually rewriting history, by mesmerising the people generally
Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again. It feels strange - almost as if Asimov hated Orwell. So many personal attacks.
And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.
Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov miss it ?
"Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."
" Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not
take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. "
Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.
He makes a lot of great points, but I vaguely feel he missed the point of the book. I guess he "just couldn't like get into it man."
>In fact, in one of the more
laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of
permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources
and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower
classes in being.
Short version - OP, you've either pulled a terrifying psy-op or proven that the nearly 100-year old one is still in effect.
Either way, I need to be a hell of a lot more discerning what I read online, because if I hadn't known for sure that money has nothing to do with class in the British system, I don't know how many other parts of that article I might have absorbed before I reached the massive clangers like 'the Nazis were pretty benign'.
I don't know what everyone else on this page is talking about, really, or why. I don't even know if they're real. Maybe I'm the weirdo, freaking out because a sci-fi giant presented a skewed version of reality.
But there have been enough people in history who've created touchstone works of art intended to last through the ages to say 'this is what it looks like when ordinary people are hypnotised into bloodlust', and I'm not convinced I'd recognise any further signs in time to get off.
I really, really don't want to get off the world wide web. My life is on it, now.
But it's a web, and we must remember that webs were not built for the endless entertainment of the flies who explore it.
Guys. Look at the title of this hacker news article. Look at it again.
Then, read the article again. Look for the bits that don't add up, the way the truth shifts from one paragraph to the next. Not outrageous lies, just the little wrongnesses sprinkled here and there.
Think where you have seen that before, heard of it. Think what book is famous for tiny wrongnesses sprinkled here and there to create a world of doublespeak and wrongthink.
THINK what the article is about, and why. What the book is about and why it was written - what you know, not what you are being told. It really is that easy to deceive thinking people, if you slip the relevant details carefully into well written texts about apparently irrelevant sources.
The first sentence of 1984 is 'it was a bright, cold day in April, when the clock struck thirteen'.
The first line of that book is the most famous example of 'ok cool that's just setting the scene, onto the next... Hang on hang on, is that right? That feels off, but it's too small a detail to analyse why. I can't sanity check every innocuous sentence. It's Orwell, a serious writer, not sci-fi. My spider senses are overreacting...'
And then think why that might be relevant today.
Anybody who has read the article and commented here as if the article is straight fact, this is your wake up call.
This is how it will feel to be propoganidised into reading blatant fiction as fact, skipping past all the red flags in the text and honestly not even seeing them. This is how it will feel to read an article that hinges on the premise that 2 + 2 = 5, and agree unquestioningly, because your fact-checking mind has been slowly, subtly exhausted by countless red herring tangents.
The article has some absolutely wild, insane takes like
>"To be sure, the Nazis organised mass
meetings of delirium [anti-Semitism] that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no
permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans
surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives"
That is quite literally absolutely contradicted by EVERY reasonable interpretation of history. Not even the most fervent Hitler apologists seriously claimed that anti-Semitism was a fleeting, minor flash in the pan or that Germany surrendered at the first hint of pushback.
But people here appear to have taken the statement as fact, or at least, not important enough to question the honest veracity of the rest of the article.
How many of you are going to go the rest of your lives with the impression that Orwell was, in fact, an elitist snob who hated the proles, because you read it somewhere (this article) and it just kinda embedded itself in your mind, not important enough to challenge?
How many other things do you think or feel, because of ideas planted there even more subtly, more deliberately and pervasively, than a bloody opinion piece on the book about "The Party [convincing] you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command", linked on a site about hacking, with a title that should make any literate westerner begin with a strong sense of 'well something ain't right'?!
And you know what, it still works. The trick, the little lies mixed with the absurd ones, they still confuse you. By the time I'd clicked on the article, I'd forgotten about the 'Isaac Asimov' part enough to believe the rest.
I started writing the comment below until it occurred to me that, of all the books to be reviewed with a glaring sense of wrongness and weirdness, 1984 seemed a little too on-the-nose to be accidental. Halfway through writing, I went back and looked more at the article, read about the Nazis being benign and anti-Semitism a momentary lapse of reason, read about Orwell fighting in the Spanish civil war yet unfit to fight in WWII (presented with no further explanation), and a bunch of things that didn't add up.
Then I looked at the rest of the comments on this page, with the sinking feeling that we as a society are failing an open-book test. If we lose, it's war, all over again. The answers are all right there in front of us. In this case, there's an entire book on DO NOT BELIEVE THE SHADOWY AUTHORITIES CHANNELLING YOUR HATRED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT 2+2=5, the book has been opened and put on the table right in front of us, the title and author practically circled in red ink...
... And yet, the first thing I spotted was how silly Americans are. And everyone else appears to be lost in the debate of why we must always be vigilant to the threat of our eternal enemies, Eastasia.
My comment, abandoned when the brain ticking got a bit too loud to ignore
> However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full.
Honestly, this line broke the immersion I didn't realise we need to enjoy non fiction biographical / analytical articles as much as fiction.
It was like a scrolling ticker in red letters saying 'this is based on an American cultural transposition of a true story'.
The writing was good, informative, bite-sized without seeming shallow, but after that line it was like ... like reading a well balanced article from a trusted source on a non-controversial topic like the history of coffee, that casually mentions a region in Africa that would later be the birthplace of the US president Obama or something. Not really relevant to the rest of the article, not impossible to understand why an author could make that error. But such a jarring divergence from your culture's values and truths that your brain is slapped into the wobbly existentialism of remembering that 'truth' and 'facts' are entirely subjective and dependent not on honesty or intelligence so much as who is around you and how you were brought up.
Which is pretty unnerving when reading Kafka or deep philosophy (or the news, nowadays), and really not what I was prepared for in the middle of a benign article about a the famous author book I know very well, somehow via a technology forum, which I had only clicked on to see why said famous author had morphed from Eric Blair, to his chosen nom de plume George Orwell, to Isaac Asimov.
Even today in the United States people voted for someone who actively tries to dismantle the legal system, pushes for more control in the hands of the executive powers, uses the military against its own citizens, constantly questions election integrity, emphasizes loyalty over free speech, encourages a "Great Leader" cult of personality, attacks political opponents with all possible means, promotes isolationism, militarizes law enforcement, the list goes on. All these are hallmarks of totalitarianism – which is what 1984 is all about.
Many people are shallow thinkers with no intellectual integrity who have never learned much of anything and say the most incredibly foolish, ignorant, and dishonest things.
hleszek|24 days ago
> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.
pcf|23 days ago
zhoujing204|24 days ago
We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look at the library purges in conservative states and the push to co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental substrate of free speech.
riazrizvi|24 days ago
webdoodle|24 days ago
[deleted]
buzzerbetrayed|24 days ago
Animats|24 days ago
The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B", and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin, cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.
"1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.
int0x29|24 days ago
ninalanyon|24 days ago
tenthirtyam|24 days ago
Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
janwillemb|24 days ago
rawgabbit|24 days ago
TMWNN|24 days ago
Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.
pavlov|24 days ago
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
internet_points|23 days ago
rpigab|24 days ago
China begs to differ.
calini|24 days ago
tomhow|24 days ago
Isaac Asimov's Review of “1984” (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390752 - March 2021 (6 comments)
Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164679 - Oct 2018 (8 comments)
TMWNN|24 days ago
[deleted]
elephanlemon|24 days ago
> Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.
> Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
> This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
sdwr|24 days ago
melagonster|24 days ago
This is funny for me. The most common type of criticize for Asimov's work is that people complain Asimov did not add enough women in his book. The world is changing so quickly.
harry8|24 days ago
jamescrowley|24 days ago
[deleted]
elteto|24 days ago
bananaflag|24 days ago
Amorymeltzer|24 days ago
>In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-free as compared with the decades before it. There have been local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources. That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.
...
>He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.
I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan rhyming with Orwell a bit.
And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.
kevin_thibedeau|24 days ago
tokai|24 days ago
epistasis|24 days ago
We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.
Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought that was mostly a leftist problem.
just-the-wrk|24 days ago
rottc0dd|24 days ago
[1]: https://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essa...
BoredGuyAtWork|24 days ago
The one thing Asimov gives Orwell credit for is predicting that there would be three separate great powers? Like, what? The other nations don't matter at all. We're not even sure they really exist or not. Or how he complains that Orwell used a missile strike, instead of calling it what, a 2X00 Plasma Fueled Missile Strike? It's not about the missile strike. It's about the fear the missile strike incites into people. People afraid are easy to control.
Or about how the warring nations didn't use nukes. Like, there's no way Asimov didn't understand that it was probably not even the other nations that were responsible, but rather the party itself, right? But that's what it sounds like. It reminds me of how in the Foundation series, one of the characters has an "atomic" wristwatch. Like, you can tell that Asimov thought that would be possible in the future and would be cool, and just had to include it. But really, who cares. As if cool gadgets or what people might use in the future is what makes or breaks science fiction. Not to mention how outdated an atomic watch feels now.
Asimov had great ideas, but his actual writing ability doesn't hold a candle to George Orwell's. Orwell was a true literary master. Asimov was a very creative scientist, with a lot of ideas in his head, and he successfully put them to paper.
ptdorf|20 days ago
> He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Asimov refuses to concede that Orwell beat him at his game. The book is not about predicting future gadgets but societal patterns and operating models.
kleiba|24 days ago
https://theresanaiforthat.com/
fake-name|24 days ago
This is such a core misunderstanding that Asimov seems to have, and it kind of kills his entire analysis for me.
The assumption is that only some small fraction of a fraction of the people who could be surveilled at any time are being surveilled.
The crux of the thing is that everyone COULD be under surveillance at any time, so in effect everyone must behave as if they are being observed because they do not know they are not.
bitwize|24 days ago
drivers99|24 days ago
shmerl|24 days ago
I think he had enough of it to foresee it for any authoritarian regime. You can find examples of what he describes today.
zelos|23 days ago
"To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother."
Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there was no central dictator, just the system.
kergonath|24 days ago
Amusingly, when he writes
> Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
I wonder what he’d think of the Stasi, which had a network of informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.
Also, when he wrote
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don’t know when someone is looking was chilling. I’m not sure that would be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.
And, finally:
> George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Science fiction does not forecast. FFS. Even him surely could not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute totalitarian government with just enough technology to be dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on 1984 for not being sciencey enough.
slidehero|24 days ago
tehnub|24 days ago
>In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.
Based on this quote and others, it seems Asimov didn't believe that Orwell intended the novel as science fiction, although others categorize it that way. I would say he's attacking the interpretation of it as science fiction, but it veers into an attack on Orwell, which is unfortunate.
You write
>Science fiction does not _forecast_.
Not to be overly pedantic but to be fair to Asimov, he didn't exactly say science fiction _necessarily_ does that, but rather it's a knack related to science fiction.
lijf|23 days ago
kleiba|24 days ago
Sound familiar?
kavalg|23 days ago
... but the latter may greatly benefit from the former
sifar|24 days ago
And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.
Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov miss it ? "Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."
" Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. "
Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.
sillywabbit|23 days ago
alex_be|23 days ago
qwertytyyuu|24 days ago
banku_brougham|23 days ago
>In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in being.
DontForgetMe|21 days ago
I don't know what everyone else on this page is talking about, really, or why. I don't even know if they're real. Maybe I'm the weirdo, freaking out because a sci-fi giant presented a skewed version of reality.
But there have been enough people in history who've created touchstone works of art intended to last through the ages to say 'this is what it looks like when ordinary people are hypnotised into bloodlust', and I'm not convinced I'd recognise any further signs in time to get off.
I really, really don't want to get off the world wide web. My life is on it, now. But it's a web, and we must remember that webs were not built for the endless entertainment of the flies who explore it.
DontForgetMe|21 days ago
Think where you have seen that before, heard of it. Think what book is famous for tiny wrongnesses sprinkled here and there to create a world of doublespeak and wrongthink.
THINK what the article is about, and why. What the book is about and why it was written - what you know, not what you are being told. It really is that easy to deceive thinking people, if you slip the relevant details carefully into well written texts about apparently irrelevant sources.
The first sentence of 1984 is 'it was a bright, cold day in April, when the clock struck thirteen'. The first line of that book is the most famous example of 'ok cool that's just setting the scene, onto the next... Hang on hang on, is that right? That feels off, but it's too small a detail to analyse why. I can't sanity check every innocuous sentence. It's Orwell, a serious writer, not sci-fi. My spider senses are overreacting...'
And then think why that might be relevant today. Anybody who has read the article and commented here as if the article is straight fact, this is your wake up call.
This is how it will feel to be propoganidised into reading blatant fiction as fact, skipping past all the red flags in the text and honestly not even seeing them. This is how it will feel to read an article that hinges on the premise that 2 + 2 = 5, and agree unquestioningly, because your fact-checking mind has been slowly, subtly exhausted by countless red herring tangents.
The article has some absolutely wild, insane takes like >"To be sure, the Nazis organised mass meetings of delirium [anti-Semitism] that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives"
That is quite literally absolutely contradicted by EVERY reasonable interpretation of history. Not even the most fervent Hitler apologists seriously claimed that anti-Semitism was a fleeting, minor flash in the pan or that Germany surrendered at the first hint of pushback. But people here appear to have taken the statement as fact, or at least, not important enough to question the honest veracity of the rest of the article. How many of you are going to go the rest of your lives with the impression that Orwell was, in fact, an elitist snob who hated the proles, because you read it somewhere (this article) and it just kinda embedded itself in your mind, not important enough to challenge? How many other things do you think or feel, because of ideas planted there even more subtly, more deliberately and pervasively, than a bloody opinion piece on the book about "The Party [convincing] you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command", linked on a site about hacking, with a title that should make any literate westerner begin with a strong sense of 'well something ain't right'?!
And you know what, it still works. The trick, the little lies mixed with the absurd ones, they still confuse you. By the time I'd clicked on the article, I'd forgotten about the 'Isaac Asimov' part enough to believe the rest. I started writing the comment below until it occurred to me that, of all the books to be reviewed with a glaring sense of wrongness and weirdness, 1984 seemed a little too on-the-nose to be accidental. Halfway through writing, I went back and looked more at the article, read about the Nazis being benign and anti-Semitism a momentary lapse of reason, read about Orwell fighting in the Spanish civil war yet unfit to fight in WWII (presented with no further explanation), and a bunch of things that didn't add up.
Then I looked at the rest of the comments on this page, with the sinking feeling that we as a society are failing an open-book test. If we lose, it's war, all over again. The answers are all right there in front of us. In this case, there's an entire book on DO NOT BELIEVE THE SHADOWY AUTHORITIES CHANNELLING YOUR HATRED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT 2+2=5, the book has been opened and put on the table right in front of us, the title and author practically circled in red ink... ... And yet, the first thing I spotted was how silly Americans are. And everyone else appears to be lost in the debate of why we must always be vigilant to the threat of our eternal enemies, Eastasia.
My comment, abandoned when the brain ticking got a bit too loud to ignore
> However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full.
Honestly, this line broke the immersion I didn't realise we need to enjoy non fiction biographical / analytical articles as much as fiction. It was like a scrolling ticker in red letters saying 'this is based on an American cultural transposition of a true story'.
The writing was good, informative, bite-sized without seeming shallow, but after that line it was like ... like reading a well balanced article from a trusted source on a non-controversial topic like the history of coffee, that casually mentions a region in Africa that would later be the birthplace of the US president Obama or something. Not really relevant to the rest of the article, not impossible to understand why an author could make that error. But such a jarring divergence from your culture's values and truths that your brain is slapped into the wobbly existentialism of remembering that 'truth' and 'facts' are entirely subjective and dependent not on honesty or intelligence so much as who is around you and how you were brought up.
Which is pretty unnerving when reading Kafka or deep philosophy (or the news, nowadays), and really not what I was prepared for in the middle of a benign article about a the famous author book I know very well, somehow via a technology forum, which I had only clicked on to see why said famous author had morphed from Eric Blair, to his chosen nom de plume George Orwell, to Isaac Asimov.
Then, when I realised
dominodave01|24 days ago
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fortran77|24 days ago
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internet_points|23 days ago
kergonath|24 days ago
jibal|23 days ago
rexpop|23 days ago