Opposed to him were passionate Spanish anarchists, syndicalists, and communists, who bitterly resented the fact that the necessities of fighting the Franco fascists got in the way of their fighting each other.

lmao

The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

What could have been… Every time I read about past communists I’m reminded that they were so much cooler than we are today.

From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action.

So Asimov’s read on Orwell is that he was a leftist until some other leftist’s upset him and for that he then spent a lifelong vendetta against leftists.

It was almost a matter of patriotism in the West to buy it and talk about it, and perhaps even to read parts of it

Asimov is fucking catty this is so funny.

One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers for every person watched. And then, of course, the watchers must themselves be watched since no one in the Orwellian world is suspicion-free. Consequently, the system of oppression by two-way television simply will not work.

No longer true thanks to AI summaries, enormous quantities of information can be boiled down to short summaries allowing a single operator to monitor tens of thousands.

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.

Asimov sincerely does not like Orwell.

To summarise, then: 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.

The world may go communist, if not by 1984, then by some not very much later date; or it may see civilisation destroyed. If this happens, however, it will happen in a fashion quite different from that depicted in 1984 and if we try to prevent either eventuality by imagining that 1984 is accurate, then we will be defending ourselves against assaults from the wrong direction and we will lose.

This is fascinating. I thought Asimov was a lib? I thought he didn’t like communism? But this paragraph suggests otherwise? He sounds very much like he thinks the world will either go communist or be destroyed.

Asimov literally said - INTO THE TRASH IT GOES

Many people think of 1984 as a science fiction novel, but almost the only item about 1984 that would lead one to suppose this is the fact that it is purportedly laid in the future. Not so! Orwell had no feel for the future, and the displacement of the story is much more geographical than temporal […] The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way.

Hot take: Asimov was off the mark on this point. He seems to be falling into the same trap that LeGuin criticized in her essay “A Rant About “Technology””:

Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

This is not an acceptable use of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn’t “hi,” isn’t necessarily '“low” in any meaningful sense.

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…

In that sense, the society depicted in 1984 is very much one that has advanced technologically compared to the time and place when the book was written, but most of those advancements come in the realm of bureaucracy and social control: in its security apparatus, in its production of trashy low-effort media to keep its citizenry distracted, and in its sheer capabilities of keeping people under watch, compliant, and obedient.

It’s still a bad novel for many other reasons, though.