1984
I'm just reading 1984, I've never read the book before. I was never a major book worm (unless technical manuals and papers).
Oh my, what a world I have been missing out on. Its such a great book, with such shockingly accurate portrayals of some aspects of modern life, especially as it was written in 1948.
Oh my, what a world I have been missing out on. Its such a great book, with such shockingly accurate portrayals of some aspects of modern life, especially as it was written in 1948.
Post edited by Scottie_uk on
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Comments
It is scary how much of it rings true.
Scottie, have you read either of these two? (If you liked 1984 then you should)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
Oh, and Brave New World of course!
Have to say that I found both the film and book to be rather depressing.
Yes I can see why people think it's a classic, but I have no desire to read or watch them again.
Both very good, with the book (as always) better than the movie, but yes, depressing stuff. Like Pink Floyd's "The Wall", needs to be watched once, but not anything i'd want to see a second time.
Try watching Brazil... it follows a similar theme but (if I remember right, has been a while since i've seen it) has great touches of pythonesque humour (it is a Terry Gillian film after all!)
Still haven't started on 1984 but I have heard enough of it to finally have a look at it.
Speaking of bleak futures, anyone read The Road yet? Found it to be a cracking read.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Brilliant, so simple. :)
This is more up my alleyway, upbeat, happy and I like the colours:
it's 1984 and there's no mention of the speccy.
Nor Spot, and he'd already been around for 4 years. Orwell was waaay off.
On the other hand, under the fiction of Fahrenheit 451 lies a great essay on the importance of the written word in an hedonistic world that seems to consume everything in the space of seconds, for which only the present counts. Something which still makes you think a lot about what we experience nowadays.
As is everything written by Cormac McCarthy! It's been a few years since i read The Road but it's still spinning in my head. I think chances are big that humanity will yet be in this position, life on earth is after all so fragile. And whatever catastrophy will wipe out mankind nothing says it will be swift and overnight, more likely it will take years like in the book.
Excellent movie too! Nothing like that other cr*p of Book of Eli with a post-apocalyptic theme that came out around the same time.
You would be walking around the dystopian city in the earlier levels and some bases/ party buildings in the later ones. There would be different classes of people - proles, outer party members, inner party members, guards and so on... Plus a lot of telescreens, microphones, cameras, bombs and rockets falling on the city and Big Brother posters.
And you have a platformer with a great backstory :smile:
Maybe Big Brother could be the final enemy ;)
could be full of win that
What, no rats? :mad:
Orwell tells us you can't have a dystopian utopia without a bunch of hungry rats.
We do they're called chavs.
let's call denton design!
Hah! pretty good. Here's something completely unrelated I posted before reading your comment, otherwise I might have been inclined to post it here :-P
I'd recommend "England Your England" and "Politics and the English Language" for starters. Also try and get some of his Tribune columns if you can. He was extremely intelligent, highly principled (as opposed to ideological) and had a good understanding of literature, history and political history which made his analysis of the political situation of his lifetime illuminating at a time when most political writers were simply indulging in party-line orthodoxy about "fascist octopus"'s and the like. In fact, for me, he's the best source on the politics of the time.
He wasn't perfect. He was homophobic, even taking into account the social mores of the time, sometimes apparently naive (in an otherwise-good critique of Salvador Dali's work, he expresses surprise that Dali continued masturbating "into adulthood") and he occasionally makes claims that, in hindsight, look silly (eg arguing that the Home Guard during World War II had created an armed citizenry who would turn their weapons on the British upper class once the war ended), I also think some of his arguments about language are overly-pendantic or inverted-snobbery, but most of his stuff is thoughtful, insightful and still supremely relevant.
*It's not supposed to be a prediction of what the world would be like in 1984; it's in a large part satirical even comical; "thoughtcrime" didn't predict political correctness (largely because the concept already existed with the religious concept of "heresy" and "impure thought" - organised religion as well as stalinism and fascism serves as a basis for IngSoc); IngSoc isn't supposed to be Communism (it's supposed to be Oligarchical Collectivism, as described in detail in Goldstein's book, which has emerged, quite openly, from an originally socialist revolution); the world of 1984 probably couldn't actually exist for various economic and social reasons but that's not really the point, etc etc.
:lol: After I'd written that post I knew that the first thing someone would respond to specifically would be the Dali wanking.