Nineteen Eighty-Four

He was writing about the mechanics of power, and those mechanics haven't changed.

We're looking at a world carved into three totalitarian superstates, and London has become this grim, decaying city called Airstrip One.

Right, and it's run by the Party, with Big Brother's face on every poster.

But here's what got me.

If there's one novel which has been a rite of passage for postwar generations, it's George Orwell's Great Warning 1984. published almost 80 years ago, which has echoes in many books since not least the one we've just discussed, Exit Party.

In the year 1984, Britain has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, where there's mass surveillance through two-way telescreens, and we're spying on and denouncing your family, your friends, your neighbours... is a fact of life.

Independence of thought is a crime, one to which the central protagonist, Winston Smith, falls prey.

There have been countless adaptations for stage and screen, including ballet and opera, and elements adopted in popular series such as Big Brother and Room 101.

I've seen worse places to retire.

Your face will remain on the posters because it's nice to have a figurehead, but you are no longer personally involved in the front line of Oceanian politics.

Men, unload the prisoner.

And the other one.

Uh, firstly, um, I'm gonna go through them in, like, chronological order from when I read them.

Uh, the first one I read was Nineteen Eighty-Four, the George Orwell book.

Sure.

Of course.

I need to read that book.

What, Nineteen Eighty-Four? Oh, that is where f- Big Brother's from.

I keep thinking it's a DC thing.

Why can't I read that? Uh -

Mm-hmm

... uh, in 1984, what was it? With Oceania-

Mm-hmm

... uh, Asia, and the Pacific world, more or less something, something similar.

How do authors establish a world of total, inescapable unfreedom in just 10 pages?

This brings us to the architecture of oppression, and the absolute gold standard for this is George Orwell's 1949 masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We have to start with the opening line because it does so much heavy lifting.

Yep.