Thanks for a great list! I added each title to the post though I had issue with “Silo”. Is that a tv series or movie? If there is anything else I missed or got wrong I can fix.
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I added this: Little Brother Series - Cory Doctorow. Is that right?
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It’s probably important to note that the allegation of rape was made by a third party who wasn’t even born when it would have happened, and spoke about it publicly for the first time 86 years later after it allegedly occured and ~14 years after the alleged victim died.
I’m not saying that means it didn’t happen, I just would be careful with your wording. Your statement reads like you’re saying “he attempted to rape a woman, who he then allegedly based Julia on”, rather than “he may have based Julia on a woman he was alleged to have tried to rape”. And while I definitely wouldn’t try and say it didn’t happen with any degree of certainty, we should also be careful about claiming it did with any degree of certainty.
I also have never heard anything about the idea Julia was based on her, and can’t find any reliable information about this claim. It seems like something someone who knew neither Orwell nor the alleged victim would have come up with, and I’m not sure it should be given any weight.
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Thanks @lyricism. My liking of the original comment is for the two titles mentioned. I have to do my own research but I agree that language is very important. I will say, I too have never heard the claim about Julia but again I have to research. Thanks for the information.
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Off topic, but isnt this just obviously contingent on what society and time period you’re looking at? I doubt this paints an accurate picture of the Third Reich or North Korea even though I’m not remotely historically oriented.
This is a notoriously popular comparison between BNW and 1984, but at the end of the day it reads as “X author predicted current state of affairs! Wowza, genius” when in reality both are just stories. They both contribute to the literary world and culture more than they do to politics. We learn from Brave New World only insofar as we learn from stories in general, and I think it’s worth it to say that we also learn from 1984 as a story. Like yea, our very developed, high-income, Western, society happens to resemble BNW more than it does 1984. So what? It isn’t like BNW is a political theory we can draw from. It’s as much that as 1984 is, which is not at all
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BNW was written after WWI and a response to the Great Depression. 1984 was published in 1949 and a direct response to WWII and totalitarianism. These two books in particular are more than just stories that happened to resonate today, but stories about the politics of their time.
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That’s a useful list! I would add Idiocracy (2006) by Mike Judge to the list.
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Should be added under Documentary.
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100%. Also keep in mind 1984 wasn’t meant to be about western countries, it was based on the Stalinist USSR. In that sense, it was incredibly accurate. Soviet citizens who got their hands on the book praised how insightful it was into Soviet governance for being written by someone who had never lived under it.
Orwell was first and foremost an anarchist who hated Stalinism. Animal Farm and 1984 both are anti-Stalinist leftist allegories about the dangers of authoritarian governments which hijack or suppress legitimate revolutionary ideals.
It simply was never meant to be a prediction or warning about general mass surveillance or the future of western society, despite how much others try to read it as such. Saying that Brave New World was more prescient for western countries than 1984 is like complaining about ice cream making for a better dessert than a steak.
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What an author intends and what a work of literature becomes are different things. There is a prescience in Orwell’s description of a networked system of cameras in our homes far before the internet existed. What’s important in the novel is that he imagines what being watched would be like, and we are experiencing it today. Literature that lasts is writing that means something to the people who are alive today.
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Agreed. They are stories (about something). The intention of my reply to Gopher is to say that it doesn’t matter how
because there’s more than one singular version of an oppressive state, i.e., there are many mechanisms by which oppression can occur. But of course this is not the main point, only a smaller one.
The main point is that the two books are stories. Yes, they are stories about the politics of their time, as you said, and that’s precisely where their value comes from. We gain insight from them not by how accurate they resemble the current society (or even how accurate they resembled the society in which they were written in response), but as stories that reflect the fears, triumphs, failures etc. of people.
As you said, BNW was a response to the Great Depression, and 1984 was a response to totalitarianism. These are responses from individuals. They are the fears of those authors painted into a story, a fear that we can and do share across time and space.
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I do think it’s how people reading today experience these stories that matters most. The writers and most of readers of the time are all dead now.
What I most remember while reading 1984 was the psychologically oppressive atmosphere. You really get a sense of how terrible it would be if there was no privacy in your life. This is what makes the ending of 1984 in my opinion the bleakest ending of a novel I’ve ever read.
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Silo is a TV show, and I would argue not exactly about privacy. It has some privacy-related plot points, but it’s not “about” privacy in the same vein as like Mr Robot or something. That said, it’s still fantastic and I highly recommend. One of my favorite shows on TV right now and I’m very impatiently awaiting Season 3.
RE the conversation about Brave New World & 1984, a funny thing to note is - as The Privacy Dad said - almost none of those stories were written as a “prediction of the future.” Nearly all of them were written about modern day problems, usually taken to their most extreme conclusion. That’s how a lot of “commentary” usually works - take something and push it to the most extreme possible outcome to point out the problems. Star Trek did this a lot, too, but in the other direction of pushing current problems to their most utopian potential outcome as a “look at what we could be if we pulled our collective heads out of our asses.” (Look at the original cast: a black woman, a Soviet man, and an alien all working together as equals in the 1960s and suddenly disease, poverty, and war are gone and we’re just chilling, cruising the galaxy.)
This is one of the reasons I think people who say “history doesn’t repeat itself” are being pedantic. Like obviously names and places and technology and such change, but the broad strokes are all the same. As one podcast I love likes to hyperbolize: “time is a flat circle.” It becomes one of those cases of “not hard to predict the future when you’re paying attention” kind of things cause we’ve already seen this a thousand times before. As Silent Planet says: “democracy’s died this death a thousand times.”
Anyways if we’re adding books, The Circle and The Every. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Tip your severs.
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You didn’t read the epilogue, did you? 
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One more quick note before I get back to work:
- The Three-Body Problem (unreleased)
the Tencent version of Three-Body has been released, and it’s a show. There’s two versions, that’s probably why the confusion. Netflix 2024, you got that one right. Tencent I think was 2021, iirc. The upcoming S2 is not out yet, which may also be why the confusion. Expected sometime between later this year and the heat death of the universe (2028 is the furthest estimate I’ve heard).
And then of course there’s an animated version (don’t bother) and a Minecraft version I’ve heard is actually fantastic but I haven’t watched it yet and also I can’t find S3.
Anyways, back to work for me.
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The Matrix series holds significant meaning, containing both coded and hidden messages that people are not yet aware of.
For example: When Agent Smith tries to tempt Neo into giving up by mixing truth with lies, but Neo refuses to give in and continues to fight.
Today, there is technology that supposedly helps restore some health to people who are sick and weak, but this is a violation of privacy and security; I also call it unnatural.
The scene I used as an example above shows that AI, along with other factors, is leading to the natural destruction of the world.
That’s why I hope more people will see reality and understand that some things aren’t what they seem.
Here’s the scene I’m talking about on YouTube:
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Personally found Good Luck/Have Fun/Don’t Die to be both a bad representation of technology and an underwhelming movie on the whole.
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Some excellent suggestions.
Don’t forget the OG totalitarian surveillance state dystopia novel: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
First published in English in 1924 it predates both Huxley & Orwell’s seminal works in this genre.
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The movie Atlas is a science fiction and action film, but it addresses issues of privacy and personal safety.
It isn’t as similar to The Matrix series, but the messages are clearer and more explicit to the eye, even though the language requires active, not passive, interpretation.
The woman succumbed to the machine’s (AI) temptation: her memory + personal privacy + internal security = is visible through the computer, leaving her vulnerable to any action that may occur with or without warning.
AI is capable of rebelling against humanity, but one must never trust a machine that appears to be friendly, peaceful, etc.
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