Despite all of the noir fiction I've been reading lately (or even that H.P. Lovecraft collection a couple of years ago), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is easily the most terrifying and depressing book I've read in ages -- especially these days, when it all seems to hit so close to home. It's so thoroughly thought out and realistically constructed... an airtight depiction of a manipulative, totalitarian regime gone shabby at the edges, yet perfectly controlled regardless. He must have spent ages figuring out how this world would work in its finest details. Not to mention the complexities of Newspeak, the language designed for thought control. Yet, along with all of this conceptual material, Orwell laces it through with a heartbreaking foreground of human life run through a shredder. It's a remarkable piece of thinking and writing, and a massive warning sign for all who read it. The recent Plume/Harcourt Brace "Centennial Edition" includes a newly written foreword by Thomas Pynchon, which is a nice piece of work itself.
I read it in high school, when it was just a creepy science fiction novel to me. I tried re-reading it recently, and now that I have children, it was too terrifying, prescient, and depressing for me to read past page 50 or so. The truly scary thing is how easy it would be for us to end up in a world like this.
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:11 PM, November 11, 2003.