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Politics
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Nineteen Eighty-Four

Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Plume, 2003, 368pp, 1st ed.

Thought Police. Big Brother. Orwellian. These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984. The story of one man's nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory, 1984 is a prophetic, haunting tale.
Synopsis

Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes written 1984) is a 1949 dystopian novel by George Orwell about the totalitarian regime of the Party. Orwell reversed the order of the digits "48" in the numeral of the year numbered "1948", during which year he was writing the novel, to obtain the "84" in the "1984" title. The novel depicts an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control.

The individual is always subordinated to the masses, and it is in part this philosophy which allows the Party to manipulate and control humanity. In the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party's propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meagre existence disillusions him to the point of seeking rebellion against Big Brother, eventually leading to his arrest, torture, and conversion.

As literary political fiction, 1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction subgenre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and concepts of Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Memory hole, et cetera, became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective Orwellian, denoting George Orwell's writings and totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945). Other classifications for the novel may include science fiction and satire.

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