Nineteen Eighty-Four

1.George Orwell

    "Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism."

──by wikipedia

    Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are the two most famous novels of his. Both of them are talking about the Totalitarianism(極權主義) and the power-follower, they are considered to be the classic work of the political allegory.

2.Story

    In 1984 (the future in the author's mind), Winston Smith lives in Airstrip One (一號空降場) (the former United Kingdom), a province of Oceania (大洋國) after a global atomic war, one of the world's three superstates.
    "Big Brother is watching you."
    It is a world that whatever you done is monitored by the telescreen(雙向電視) of the Party, which believes in the boss──Big Brother.
    Winston Smith hates the Party, he writes the true situation of the world in the diary and want it to last until the Party is destroyed, because every facts can be tampered(竄改) by the Party.
    Then he falls in love with Julia, although having a lover is not allowed for the Party member.
    They enjoy the illicit romance, and go to one of the Inner Party's member, O'Brein, who they consider to be a rebel, to see if they can destroy the Party.
    But he is actually a thought police, he arrests them, and re-education them by some cruel punishment.
    Then he let them out, but they can't face to each other because they are forced to betray each other.
    The last sentence of the novel is,
    "I love Big Brother."

3.My Thought

    As a person who lives in a peace world, the Totalitarianism government in the book is shocked for me. It really predicts some countries like Russia in the WW2.
    And the technology in the story is very interesting, the novel machine and the poem machine still can't appear today. It seems that human's brain still can't be replaced. Some like telescreen is developed, not being used for monitoring but for chatting.
    Maybe the future we predict in the novels nowadays will be discussed by the future people, too!