Post #1754430
2026-04-28 20:20 UTC
Replies (5)
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@Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2026-04-28 20:49
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s. It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
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@Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip 2026-04-28 22:11
I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people. He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind. It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)
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@KombatWombat@lemmy.world 2026-04-29 06:14
I dropped it about halfway through. I’m sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5. I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn’t really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don’t need real agency. The lesson it’s trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn’t let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations’ lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
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@toynbee@piefed.social 2026-04-29 00:28
It’s the one with all the animals, right?
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@MutantTailThing@lemmy.world 2026-04-28 21:08
It insists upon itself.