Yup, this is going on the "Please make this fiction again" shelf too:
"You represent and encourage the worst in people. You're not interested in anythiYup, this is going on the "Please make this fiction again" shelf too:
"You represent and encourage the worst in people. You're not interested in anything other than having the presidency, but you're also not interested in actually being president."
Written 20 years ago. I hate the fact that Warren Ellis' most sordid speculation is so close to current affairs. A great if disturbing and depressing comic....more
Wouldn't it be nice is slightly insane dystopian writers stopped being so prescient? Wouldn't it be nice is slightly insane dystopian writers stopped being so prescient? ...more
“Some things, America would tolerate, but other things, it would never, ever forgive.”
This was my first Cory Doctorow book, and I think it goes withou“Some things, America would tolerate, but other things, it would never, ever forgive.”
This was my first Cory Doctorow book, and I think it goes without saying that this guy is extremely smart and has a very keen understanding of how the world works, and how people can get pushed around by said world. This collection of four contemporary dystopias was published in 2019, and two of them are so eerily prescient that I cringed almost the entire time I read them. But I bet that doesn’t make Mr. Doctorow feel smug; I’m sure he’s just a little sad that his speculative fiction hit reality on the nose so accurately.
“Unauthorized Bread” is a story of immigration and predatory capitalism that ties together the struggle of one refugee to make a stable and safe place for herself in the United-States, after an endless and convoluted process of immigration, only to find herself held hostage by her... toaster? I suspect the inspiration here is those coffee machines that only accept pods of their own brands and essentially hold their customer base in a bit of a stranglehold, because without their specific product, their machine is a very expensive and useless brick.
“Model Minority” is a thinly (read: barely) disguised Superman story, the one I’ve wanted to read for a long time, because honestly, those superheroes’ obliviousness about social problems gets a little weird sometimes. I get that Lex Luthor needs his ass kicked, but what about the cops who more or less openly murder people on the street with little to no consequences? I read this story a week or so after Derek Chauvin got convicted, and even now, I hardly dare to be cautiously optimistic. That’s exactly the feeling this story captures: one instance of police going too far made a cause celebre, but at what price?
The title story, “Radicalized”, is about the inhumanity inherent to not having universal health coverage, and making life-saving treatments and medication so expensive that people are left with very little choice but to die. Joe’s wife survived her cancer, but it was nothing short of miraculous. When he thought she was dying, he had joined an online forum that served as a support group for him and other men who had lost a loved one because insurance had refused to cover the cost of a treatment that might have saved their lives. Joe soon realizes that instead of soothing those grieving men and helping them heal, this forum pushed them deeper into their rage and resentment, until the only viable outlet for any of them is to blow up the insurance companies who they hold responsible for their loss. Full disclosure, I work for a Canadian insurance company, and it is a little more complicated than Doctorow writes it, but I am also keenly aware that people who’s claims are denied don’t care that 99% of people who work for an insurance company are ordinary people just trying to do their job and get by, just like everyone else. All they know is that their claims are denied and they are pissed. And I get it. I have zero problem believing that there are people out there who feel exactly the way Doctorow’s characters feel, and that sooner or later, one of them might snap. I don’t think this one is speculative fiction.
Finally, “The Masque of the Red Death” is the 2020 version of Poe’s famous story, where a rich asshole decides to hole up and wait out an “Event” with a few cherry-picked companions, fancy scotch and lots of guns. But here’s the thing about rich douchebags: they don’t actually understand survival because it has never been a real concern for them. They think they are smarter because they have resources, but some things don’t respond to bribes or bullets. This one actually uses the word “pandemic”. I’m a week away from my COVID shot, but seeing that word in so-called fiction written two years ago makes me grind my teeth. But this story also made me think of this brilliant song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz4fP...
Doctorow’s writing is clean, without frills, but full of compassion and humanity. Despite the upsetting themes he chose to write about, he believes in people. If you are interested in his ideas, add this book to your shelf, but maybe wait a few months before reading it. It hits a little close to home... I’ll be looking for more of his work....more
I did not want to wait too long between my reading of “Parable of the Sower” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and the sequel, “Parable of the Talents”. The first book has a great momentum that made me very eager to find out the rest of Lauren’s story – even if the setting felt uncomfortably realistic.
The manipulation of religion for the benefit of political advancement is something that has always been a huge problem for me, and when good speculative writers toy with that idea, it inevitably ends up freaking me out (I’m referring to “The Handmaid’s Tale (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), but also “The Acolyte” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which took that idea down a pretty terrifying road). Using religion to exacerbate the worst sides of a group of people until they are riled up to the point where they forget their faith was supposed to be based on love and start hurting other people is the most egregious manipulation of a good thing I can think of. The very word “religion” means to “re-link” or “re-join”: it is supposed to bring people together, so as soon as it starts creating exceptions to ideas such as “love one another”, it's missing the point. In the second book of her “Earthseed” duology, Octavia Butler drives that point home by adding two new voices to her narrative: Lauren’s husband Bankole, and their daughter Larkin/Asha.
We know early on that something terrible has happened to the small Earthseed colony founded by Lauren and her companion, and my interweaving her journal’s, Bankole’s notes and Larkin’s own writing, Butler shows us a world that hasn’t gotten better since the end of “Parable of the Sower”. If anything, things have gotten much worse, and a hate-mongering, religious fanatic new president works his followers into an increasingly violent frenzy. I will not give any of the plot away, but this is a gripping story about resilience and survival in the face of oppression and destruction.
I have to admit that I got kind of annoyed with the Earthseed “gospel”, or whatever you want to call those little poems and texts that punctuate the book. There were fewer in “Parable of the Sower”, but here, it got on my nerves, as there are plenty and they are not especially well written, nor inspiring. The religious system created by Lauren in and of itself doesn’t really bother me, as it’s based in practicality, and tangible reality: things change constantly, and we must support each other through these changes. That’s a big fat “duh” for me, but I can also see why it bears repeating. But her preachiness gets tiring, which is why this book is stronger for having more than one narrator, who are well aware that Lauren’s convictions were strong and important, but could also be rather grating. Larkin’s voice comes to balance out her mother righteousness with the wisdom of regrets and hindsight – but also a certain admiration for the work done by this determined woman.
The balance between hope and despair is not easy to maintain, but just as she did in the first tome of her duology, Butler doesn’t let her readers sink, no matter how bleak things get. In fact, as hard as it can be to read sometimes, it is also strangely comforting to think of Lauren’s perseverance and strength.
Does it freak anyone else out that Butler wrote this in 1998? Not unlike the aforementioned “Handmaid’s Tale”, this work of fiction’s prescience is alarmingly accurate: we are currently experiencing the slow erosion of the world as we knew it, and we have no idea what the next few years have in store for us. And her President Jarret might have more brain cells to rub together than Trump does, but the tone is eerily alike. I did find the way Lauren perceives Jarret’s supporters, and what ultimately motivates them very interesting: there are very thought-provoking parallels to be drawn between them and a certain segment of American voters…
Just as good as its predecessor, this book is a must-read, now more than ever....more
The world Lauren lives in hasn’t been laid to waste by war, zombies, or aliens or any of your usual cataclysms. It simply just sort of… collapsed on itself because people were in denial about the environment decaying, about the economy falling apart and about the social consequences of those slowly encroaching events. Lauren is a young girl who suffers from hyperempathy syndrome, which means she feels the pain and pleasure of those around her to the point where it can be quite debilitating. She lives in a somewhat stable walled neighborhood just outside of L.A. with her father, stepmother and siblings, where they get by on the parents’ meager salaries and whatever their little community can scrounge together. But no one is ever completely safe from thieves and arsonist… Lauren is, unfortunately, the only one lucid enough to see the writing on the wall, so when her community is attacked and destroyed, she is prepared: she has a pack with things she might need on the road, and when she can’t find any of her family members, she decides to head north, where she hopes to find a job and maybe start a community around a quasi-religious belief system she has been working on.
Lauren might seem too smart and thoughtful to be 18, but I have known a few hyper-inquisitive people of that age who would have reached similar conclusions had they been in her place. Mostly I felt for her isolation, both the one created by her outlook of her and her family’s situation, but also the alienation that she must have experienced with her hyperempathy. In some circumstances, her syndrome is a gift, and as is eventually pointed out, if more people felt others’ suffering, the world might be a better place; but in survival mode, it’s a big hurdle that makes a lot of situations very complicated and risky.
Butler dances on a fine line between complete and total bleakness and shining optimism: I have no idea how one pulls this off, but despite the truly dark stuff to be found within the pages of this book, “Parable of the Sower” is actually incredibly hopeful. While her world-building in horrifyingly plausible (the scarceness of resources, privatized law enforcement, complete lack of trust in elected officials, the heightened tension between social and racial groups, the gun violence, the eerie political slogans about making things “great again”…), her characters show an inspiring strength of spirit. While there is plenty of danger on the road they choose to take, there is also a capacity for collaboration that they were not always able to find within their own communities. I remember feeling similarly after finishing “Kindred”: crushed, but feeling like there is a way to be better people, and that Butler used her work to point that way as much as she could.
I was a bit apprehensive that the religious undertones of the story would turn me off, because they usually do. But Ms. Butler is too clever to turn her story into a preachy, didactic mess. Lauren’s ideology is based on her direct experience and the concept of Change, and she wants to establish a community that acts upon the principles of her belief system: bring together people who support each other, collaborate and work through the ever-changing reality they live to reach Earthseed’s ultimate goal: the stars. Part of me can’t help but find it a bit silly and simplistic, but there is a also a logic to Lauren’s discourse, and in her world, she is certainly the one with the clearest ideas and most reasonable solutions.
It can be a bit of an unnerving book to read, because a lot of things in here don’t feel all that far-fetched. Over many conversations with friends, it has really struck me that we have an easier time imagining social collapse than imagining a societal change radical enough to help us correct the really alarming course we are heading on, as a planet and as a society. Butler’s vision of the 2020s seems to reinforce that mental trend, as her characters are not living so much as surviving in their world, and it can be harrowing to read when you are afraid that this is truly in our near future.
My edition includes a foreword by the brilliant N.K. Jemisin, who explains much better than I could why this book, while not the crazy sci-fi one might be used to with Butler, is probably her most relevant work at this precise moment. This book is not to be missed, for fans of Butler’s other books and for anyone who hasn’t read this wonderful woman’s work before. I’m looking forward to the sequel, “Parable of the Talents”....more
“I am as guilty as you, and you are as guilty as me. We can repent together, or we can die together; it must be our joint decision.”
Urg. I need a new “I am as guilty as you, and you are as guilty as me. We can repent together, or we can die together; it must be our joint decision.”
Urg. I need a new Goodreads shelf that I will call “Please, please, please make this fiction again”. “The Sheep Look Up” will go on it, next to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, “Brave New World” and “It Can’t Happen Here”.
This book is set in a world where careless and entitled human attitudes have destroyed the environment to the point where you need to wear a gas mask when you venture out of your house, you can’t drink the water because pollution has ruined rivers and oceans all over the world, crop failings on a massive scale has made fresh produce a luxury only the very wealthy can afford (while lower classes survive on processed… edibles), the government is increasingly controlled by corporations and a bunch of diseases have mutated to resist antibiotics and other medication. People have become extremely polarized and every issue is an “us vs. everyone else” sort of deal, entertainment news are the headlines instead of actual world events of consequences, the president is basically a puppet for smarter and more ruthless political strategists, and if you are concerned about the environment then you are a dirty liberal hippie. Just a reminder: this was science-fiction in 1972!
The narrative of “The Sheep Look Up” is a collage of newspaper clippings, advertisements, poems, public announcements and more traditional chapters that cover a period of a year. All these entries seem to orbit around a contaminated shipment of relief nutrients that ends up driving an entire small African village insane, and Austin Train; a scientist now considered to be a traitor and dissident by the authorities, who want him dead. On the other hand, he is hailed as a hero by a group of violent environmental activists (think Greenpeace gone terrorist). But not unlike Ian MacKaye, he’s not quite sure what these people are doing in his name has anything to do with what he talked and wrote about before he had to go in hiding. There is a lot of civil unrest just under the surface, and Philip Mason, Peg Mankiewicz, Lucy Ramage, Hugh Pettingill and a handful of other characters watch the world collapse around them. We see their struggle to give their children good health care, to expose the cycle of corruption that keeps the status quo in place, to right the wrongs done to their planet. Their stories are interconnected because that’s how human lives are: linked to each other – and losing sight of that is the first step down a pretty bad road.
This is not what I would call a fun read: it’s bleak and depressing, but it should be read by absolutely everyone. It’s a cautionary tale of the most alarming kind: the kind you can actually see unfold in front of your eyes when you watch the news. Sure, some elements are dated and betray the context in which it was written, such as the archaic technology, some outrageous racist and sexist attitudes and a handful of hilarious expressions nobody uses anymore. But you will cringe when you read this. A lot. Because its uncomfortably familiar and eerily prescient. And the rapidly escalating rhythm of the last hundred or so pages will freak you out.
I rated it 4 and a half stars because the tone is sometimes so dry that it’s difficult to differentiate between the various characters’ points of view. I would be reading and then stopping to think “Wait, who is this guy again?”. If it hadn’t been for that, I would have been tempted to call this book perfect in it’s devastating portrayal of an all-too realistic ecopocalypse.
“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” –“A book is a loaded gun.” – Ray Bradbury
“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” – John Waters
This is going to be a review/rant and there might be spoilers.
One day, I was at the hair salon getting my mop splattered in bright pink hair dye. I can’t wear headphones with all that colored goop on my head, so obviously, I always bring a book and try to ignore the (usually) loud and (often) inane conversations I overhear as I wait for the color to set. Alas, hair salons are rarely temples of highbrow philosophy. I think I was reading an Atwood novel on that particular evening, when I overheard one of the hairdressers talking to her client. She was saying something like: “I can’t see the point of reading. I mean, if I have some free time, I don’t want to have to think, you know?”. As luck would have it, my hairdresser chose that moment to offer me a gin and tonic. I asked for a double, and homicide was averted (we often fault alcohol for the bad behavior it can result in; I say give it more credit for all the times it helped some people avoid beating an idiot to a pulp with a hairdryer).
I don’t know that other hairdresser well enough to pass judgment, but those words made me tense up and clench my hands into fists. To me, her words meant: “Why think when you can be satisfied by entertainment? Why think when (unreliable) media give you pre-chewed (potentially erroneous) information on important topics? Why think when someone else might do it for you?” I bet she’d have been fine in Bradbury’s imaginary near-future America. Content. Or too stupefied with vacuous entertainment to bother thinking about it…
I am not the first person to read this book and to look around only to find that we are living more and more in Bradbury’s nightmare, glued to screens at all times, neglectful of true human relationships, disconnected from our minds and our imagination. He was afraid of the media being controlled by the government, of people caring more about being entertained than about being informed, of humans being so disconnected from each other - even from those closest to them - that seeing someone suffer before their eyes made them feel nothing.
Guy Montag is a fireman, but not the kind we know. Books having long been banned by the government, owning them is now a criminal act, and Guy’s squad’s job is to set fire to the possessions of those who are found owning books. He meets a teenage girl named Clarisse, who seems strange to Guy at first: she doesn’t care to watch the parlor wall, the enormous television screen most people are hopelessly addicted to, preferring to be outside, thinking and talking about things that he had never thought about himself. A few days after meeting Clarisse, Guy is called upon to burn down an old woman’s house: rather than live to see her books being burnt, she sets herself on fire and dies as her home is being ransacked. In the confusion and chaos, Guy steals a book from that woman’s collection. And it turns out its not the first book he smuggled back home...
I originally read this book about ten years ago, and I had forgotten the way Bradbury perfectly illustrates the quiet desperation of Guy and Mildred’s dull life, notably through the casual attitude of the paramedics who rescue suicide attempts ten times a day. Clarisse does have a bit of the manic pixie dream girl thing going on, which is grating, but also charming because she represents a liveliness that is tragically absent from Guy’s hollow life. I had also forgotten how intriguing the ambiguous Captain Beatty is: a clearly very well-read man who has been indoctrinated by the powers that be... but has he? Would he have hunted Guy or was he trying to liberate him in a way he himself could never be? The final metaphor about how we come to embody the books we read and love is simply perfect.
If you are reading this, it’s safe to assume you love reading as much as I do. I’ve been told by someone that I fetishize books, and while they meant it as something weird, I have long embraced that fetish. Reading is definitely about the words; but I’d be lying if I told you I took no pleasure in the act of touching the pages, smelling the inimitable perfume of ink and binding glue, running my fingers along the spines of the books on my shelves and admiring those shelves the way I would a lovely painting or artwork. They are objects of infinite beauty, filled with knowledge, memories, wonder, unknown worlds and ideas to explore and beautiful language to swirl around in one’s mind, like good wine in a glass. No image horrifies me quite as much as the thought of burning books.
I have the 60th anniversary edition, with a brilliant introduction by Neil Gaiman, and plenty of essays at the end about the context in which the book was written and the many reasons it is still a relevant and significant work; all this additional material is quite worth the time to explore, especially Bradbury's own essay about why he wrote science-fiction and the coda to "Fahrenheit 451".
A lyrical and chilling book. No, it’s probably not Bradbury’s best book (though it remains my favorite for sentimental reasons). No, paper doesn’t actually burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, the characters are underdeveloped. Yes, it is occasionally didactic, the pacing is sometimes rushed and Bradbury wasn’t super good at predicting some aspects of the future (sci-fi is a thought experiment, not meteorology). But it is an important reminder that we are still lucky to have the freedom to read and to think – and that it can be taken away if we don’t use that freedom. It makes me proud to be that weird girl, sitting in a corner of the break room with her book. A must-read, in the same league as “1984” and “Brave New World”.
Reading “Fahrenheit 451”, I was reminded of a very strange play by Amélie Nothomb titled “Human Rites” (“Les Combustibles” in the original French - which makes a lot more sense), where she takes a similar idea and spins it on its head: set in a cold country under siege (Eastern Europe is implied), a small cast of characters have burned everything they own to keep warm, and eventually, the only combustibles they have left are their books. In such a situation, which book would you refrain from burning, and possibly sacrifice your comfort and life for? The play is far from perfect (probably one of her weakest works, honestly), but it is an interesting exercise of thought, as it can be interpreted to be about many things: the importance of culture and literature, certainly, but also their price – on many levels. In the play, the more books are burnt, the more animalistic and inhuman the characters get. As the symbols of their culture and civilization vanishes in the flames, so does civilized behavior......more
Re-read for the fourth or fifth time, because I watched the beautifully shot and terrifying television adaptation with my husband - who hadn't read thRe-read for the fourth or fifth time, because I watched the beautifully shot and terrifying television adaptation with my husband - who hadn't read the book before. I had chills watching the show, the bad kind. The kind that brought tears to my eyes.
Jason was impressed by a dystopia that is more social than technological: it had never occurred to me to think of the "Handmaid's Tale"'s setting like that before, but he has a point: this isn't robots or climate change fucking us up, it's good old-fashioned religious fanaticism and the brainwashing that comes along with it. We talked about how familiar it sounded, how much it creeped us out that it all felt so real. People who think we have come too far in terms of human and women's right to regress need to remember what happened when the Roman Empire crumbled: a civilization where intellectual pursuits, science and philosophy used to thrive got plunged straight into the Dark Ages, where most of the technological and scientific advancements were forgotten for hundreds of years.
I watched the show, re-read the book and I thought about how fear and pain can break someone's character. How most people don't feel a need to resist oppression until things get really, really fucking bad. How sexism hurts everyone, not just women. I thought about the clever use of colors in the narrative, the rich and subtle power of Atwood's prose, that was rendered so well on screen.
It also occurred to me during this re-read that part of the re-programming women go through in "Handmaid's Tale" includes distrusting and scorning each other. Divide and conquer, put to practical use: but this is not something Atwood invented. I feel like women not trusting and supporting each other is a real and major problem. I read a completely surreal article about what Hillary Clinton has been up to since the election, and the double-standards of judgements she's had to face (throughout the campaign and since) baffled and gutted me.
The book is haunting me again, and so is the show. If you haven’t read it yet, read it. If you have, re-read it. --- Original review:
One of the things that fascinate me the most about “The Handmaid’s Tale” is that the character of Offred used to be the kind of woman you see walking around in the street every day: a woman with a job, independent finances, a husband she chose, a child she wanted. All these things Western women take for granted in our day and age. All these things she never thought to defend until they were taken away from her. Even her name. What frightens me the most is that she remembers all of it and remembers what it was like to lose it.
When I first read this book, I had no idea it had been written in 1986. I figured that it must have been more recent than that, given the terrifyingly relevant topic of women’s reproductive rights (for instance, I love that birth control is not always covered by medical insurance, but now fertility treatments are, at least in Quebec and in other parts of Canada… the subtlety of the message seems to be lost on a lot of people…), the nuclear crisis, the political and religious extremism in the United-States in a post 9/11 world… But nope! Atwood saw that coming somehow, like the Canadian Aldous Huxley that she is… Some people compare “The Handmaid’s Tale” to “1984”, but I think it is also very much like “Brave New World”; but this is a dystopian novels and they all end up having a strong common message: please do something about the world or we are screwed!
Inspired by the sort of extreme violation of women’s rights seen in places like Saudi Arabia, Atwood wrote a plausible cautionary tale: if we let things reach their logical conclusion, we might just end up in a world where fertile women are precious property and where control over every aspect of their lives is justified by a load of hypocritical religious principles. Of course, this is greatly exaggerated, but that’s the point of speculative fiction: to ask “what if”. What if a country already inclined towards extremism used a terrorist attack on their government to justify putting the country under martial law (does anyone else remember the Patriot Act?)? What if one of the side-effects of nuclear war meant a massive infertility crisis in that country’s female population? What if instead of empowering the still-fertile women, they were turned into important men’s proprieties to make sure that the elite –and only the elite - could keep having children?
Women treated as baby factories – or if they can’t have babies, as sexual objects – is a feminist nightmare (which politician was it that said only whores used birth control?). It is a complete denial of women’s humanity, and it twists women’s power to give life into chains with which to control them. To make this more acceptable for them, all sources of intellectual stimulation must be removed, exposure to anything else than the reality of their function is strictly forbidden. And don’t even think about giving them the choice of their partners, in this baby-making process… I think women are already tricked in many ways by society into thinking they are much more free than they actually are, but that’s a whole other conversation. My point is that while such a premise is shocking, it is not that hard to imagine.
A successful dystopian novel should scare the crap out of you and “The Handmaid’s Tale” scares me. The bleak beauty of the writing hooked me and then the morbid need to know what happened to Offred kept me reading. But most importantly, a good dystopian novel should make you think. Think long and hard about the world you live in, and the world you want to live in. And this book will certainly make you think. Not about pleasant things, granted, but about things that are worth everyone’s attention.
It is almost a cliché now, to remind people that “1984” was meant as a cautionary tale, and not a damn instruction manual, but alas… Blame my severe pIt is almost a cliché now, to remind people that “1984” was meant as a cautionary tale, and not a damn instruction manual, but alas… Blame my severe punk steak, but I love good dystopian fiction, and the classic trilogy of “1984”, “Brave New World” and “Clockwork Orange” remain amongst my favorite reads. They are chilling books, because they feel like the worlds described on the page is just around the corner in real life…
It’s funny to think that Orwell wrote this as a cautionary tale against Communism. He wanted to warn the Western World of the dangers of totalitarianism, and back then, the threat was Soviet Russia. The threat is obviously different now, but the spirit of the warning remains relevant: the increasing tendency of people to be polarized in their political views shows a dangerous itching towards Orwell’s fictional world, divided into axis always at war with each other. Manipulation of mass-media, insidious surveillance of every aspects of people’s lives, the culture of fear politicians preach at their voters like twisted evangelists… It gives me very unpleasant goose bumps to think that this was once science-fiction, that people today turn a blind eye to something that was inconceivable 60 years ago…
Let’s skip over my political views and instead, let’s talk about why this is a book everyone should read at least once. “1984” has made its way into our culture to the incredible extent where we use the words “Big Brother”, “thought police” and “doublethink” all the time, countless bands have quoted the book extensively in lyrics (Bad Religion’s amazing album “The Empire Strikes First” is full of references to “1984”), the famous Apple ad, the really ridiculous reality TV show “Big Brother” (I bet Orwell is rolling in his grave because of that one)… There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to listing the pop culture references to “1984”! I think the book is worth reading, if you only want to know what it actually means when you say 2+2=5.
But the book is worth reading for so much more than that. I think people should be afraid of winding up like Winston: a soulless drone in a soulless world, who is not even capable of relaxing in his own home because his every movement is recorded and filed away, to make sure that dissidents can be found and incapacitated before they challenge and endanger the system. I think people should understand what seeing the world in black and white can lead to if you surrender your right to speak and make decisions.
Orwell was a great writer, his prose is evocative. You never get a very detailed description of the characters, because you are not meant to know exactly what they look like, but you can feel the warm wind on Winston’s skin when he walks around outdoors with Julia, you can taste the harshness of his crappy gin, you can hear the echo of O’Brien’s steps on the floor of room 101…
“1984” isn’t a light read, and while it can’t be described as horror, it can be quite terrifying, in a speculative way. But it’s just as relevant a read now than it was when it was first published. It might actually be more relevant today… but don’t take this old punk’s word for it: read it and make up your own mind....more
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