This is still so relevant now:

> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.

Interesting how pedantic he is!

> 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 in 1980 didn't have access to "Orwell, the Lost Writings", published in 1985. That details Eric Blair's ("Orwell" is a pseudonym) jobs during WWII, mostly at the British Ministry of Information. "1984"'s details are partly autobiographical. One of Blair's jobs was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English for broadcast to the colonies, primarily India and Hong Kong. He found that this was a political act. Squeezing news down to a 1000 word vocabulary required removing political ambiguity. It's hard to prevaricate in Basic English, which has a very concrete vocabulary. Hence Newspeak.

The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B", and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin, cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.

"1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.

Previously...

Isaac Asimov's Review of “1984” (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390752 - March 2021 (6 comments)

Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164679 - Oct 2018 (8 comments)

I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every mobile phone and 3D printer.

>Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening of the feminine stereotype of 1949.

This is funny for me. The most common type of criticize for Asimov's work is that people complain Asimov did not add enough women in his book. The world is changing so quickly.

After reading Asimov's review, I think the book has aged much better to be honest.

I really loved Pynchon's introduction to 1984[1] in new Penguin edition.

[1]: https://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essa...

I love Asimov for the same reason I love Orwell, namely clear 1940s-style writing (which I've also seen in Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight), so I find it funny and sad that one is criticizing the other.

Even today, many people--in the United States!--have accepted Soviet propaganda hook, line and sinker. 51% of New Yorkers, for example. Nobody has learned anything from Orwell's book.

>Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.

Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.

Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again. It feels strange - almost as if Asimov hated Orwell. So many personal attacks.

And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.

Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov miss it ? "Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."

" Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. "

Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.

>Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in being. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)

>In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-free as compared with the decades before it. There have been local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources. That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.

...

>He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.

I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan rhyming with Orwell a bit.

And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.

I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing exactly the same thing right now.

Amusingly, when he writes

> Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.

I wonder what he’d think of the Stasi, which had a network of informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.

Also, when he wrote

> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.

Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don’t know when someone is looking was chilling. I’m not sure that would be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.

And, finally:

> 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.

Science fiction does not forecast. FFS. Even him surely could not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute totalitarian government with just enough technology to be dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on 1984 for not being sciencey enough.

"1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" —Cereal Killer, Hackers, whose words ring even more true today even as we watch tech billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god in silico

timely and relevant