And Zamyatin’s _We_ was even a few years earlier. Great artists steal.

It's not just that, it's that the topic was extremely actual. Between the Russian Revolution and the general state of European countries at the beginning of the XX century, a lot of intellectuals were working hard on the concepts of "fully rational" societies, fair governance, social efficiency, just social order, and so on.

Somewhat ironically, what seems to have survived in the public consciousness is actually the critique of all those efforts (1984, We, etc). The Western mainstream seems to have abandoned any attempt to create a rational, enduring order from social chaos. Somehow we just accepted that things are fucked up and there is no hope of meaningfully unfuck them.

	▲	shmerl 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those attempts inevitably resulted in fascist dystopias (just look at past and today dictatorships), so critiques of them were and are very on point. Positive examples that went in other directions, like Huliaipole anarchistic Free Territories didn't survive for long.

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dgellow 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Here is a link for people who don’t know about it (it’s not too obvious but “we” is the actual title): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

Published in 1924, it’s a short read, I would recommend, I personally find it more compelling than Orwell’s work