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.

Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.