[HN Gopher] Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)
___________________________________________________________________
Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)
Author : doruk101
Score : 194 points
Date : 2026-02-05 21:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newworker.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newworker.org)
| tomhow wrote:
| Previously...
|
| _Isaac Asimov 's Review of "1984" (1980)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390752 - March 2021 (6
| comments)
|
| _Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164679 - Oct 2018 (8
| comments)
| TMWNN wrote:
| Thank you for that. I agree with mannykannot, miesman, and
| Wildgoose. Asimov let his own left-friendly tendencies miss the
| forest for the trees.
| nl wrote:
| I don't understand what this comment is trying to say.
|
| The commentator mannykannot didn't really comment on the
| politics other than to agree that 1984 _is_ a criticism of
| Stalism (which... I don 't think anyone would argue with?).
|
| Orwell _also_ wrote "Animal Farm" which is a criticism of
| Fascism, and Asimov leads with this.
| hvs wrote:
| "Animal Farm" is a satire of the Russian Revolution.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Correct. More to the point, when it appeared many on the
| left attempted to wave this away by claiming that it was,
| as one put it, a "gentle satire"
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Reception>
| when anyone who has read _Animal Farm_ knows that it is
| in no way gentle in its satire.
|
| What nl is attempting to do above is the latest iteration
| of what _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ both received from those
| who could not stand the spotlight of their scrutiny:
| Claim that the target is something else, and /or that
| Orwell's attacks are so pedestrianly obvious (since
| "everyone knows" that Stalinism is bad) as to be
| pointless.
| nl wrote:
| > What nl is attempting to do above
|
| Um wow talk about bad faith!
|
| Actually it's been about 35 years since I read Animal
| Farm, so I took what the review said as valid.
| jibal wrote:
| Asimov's review says it's a satire of the Russian
| Revolution, not of fascism.
|
| (Just pointing out the fact, not at all agreeing with the
| vile accusation against you.)
| nl wrote:
| Huh - yes you are right. I don't know what I was
| thinking, but it was very wrong.
| pmontra wrote:
| Well, the only difference between Fascism and Stalinism was
| more or less that Fascism was anticommunist (communists and
| fascists were killing each other in Italy when Mussolini, a
| former socialist, was raising to the power) but Stalinism
| was communism only because Stalin had to wave that
| ideological flag to become leader of that country in those
| times. Both were nationalistic (Stalin de facto killed
| internationalism), had control of economy, had full control
| of society. Dictatorships.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Asimov a republican?
| TMWNN wrote:
| No. All his life he had the politics of his Brooklyn Jewish
| background; that is, left-leaning.
| rsynnott wrote:
| As in, in the modern American sense? No; I'm baffled as to
| what would make you think that.
| bitwize wrote:
| "1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and
| he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are
| NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" --Cereal Killer, _Hackers_ , whose
| words ring even more true today even as we watch tech
| billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god _in silico_
| drivers99 wrote:
| Right before that, he says, "FYI man, alright. You could sit at
| home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes
| through like 17 computers a day." Whenever I rewatch that
| movie, I think 17 is a tiny number compared to today. Probably
| 17,000+ now.
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed. On one of the many occasions I rewatched it with my
| wife, when it came to that bit I said "17? Those are rookie
| numbers these days."
|
| Many jobs ago one of my colleagues was Steve Summit, perhaps
| best known as the comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer. One Friday
| afternoon, the rest of us except for Steve met up at our
| usual haunt for lunch and beer. Orders were placed and
| served, and the table's discussion turned to DRM and the
| benefits and drawbacks thereof. Half an hour into lunch, in
| the midst of this conversation, Steve burst in, sat down, and
| immediately joined in with "The problem with DRM is one of
| ownership. Any system with DRM is no longer under your total
| control, therefore you don't own it. You've ceded control,
| therefore ownership, to some company somewhere."
|
| Then he paused, pointed to another coworker's plate of half-
| finished fries and said "Are you gonna eat those?"
|
| You couldn't have gotten a better recreation of that Cereal
| Killer routine if you had scripted it as an homage. But Steve
| had never seen _Hackers_ ; that's just who he was/is as a
| person.
| genewitch wrote:
| if you google your name (or handle, every hacker needs a
| handle, man...) it goes through double that, if memory serves
| (i might be off by a factor of 10 either side...)
| ninalanyon wrote:
| I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review
| now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as
| well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal
| political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy
| Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every
| mobile phone and 3D printer.
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New
| World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New
| World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point
| then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to
| mislead and deflect populations' attentions.
|
| Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| (1958) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Brave_Ne
| w_Worl...
| krapp wrote:
| The TV _was_ evil?
|
| I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on
| social media now existed with television. Propaganda,
| misinformation, addiction, emotional manipulation, mind rot,
| overstimulation, excessive advertising, even moral panics
| blaming it for violence and deviant behavior.
|
| Television didn't create self-reinforcing bubbles of
| hyperreality because it represented a corporate model of
| reality applied to an entire culture. It could only do so
| much being a one-way means of communication, but bear in mind
| all most people do with social media now is consume. The more
| social media becomes like television, the worse it becomes.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| I would go so far as to say that the criticisms of
| broadcast television were completely correct; and that for
| all the problems of modern centralized social media and
| other internet use, one major good thing that it has done
| is kill off broadcast television. It is much easier now
| than it was for much of the 20th century for random
| ordinary people who weren't members of established mass
| media organizations to broadcast their ideas to the world,
| and try to build an audience that cares about their
| message. And even though this results in a lot of bad
| content being made (or just content that is uninteresting
| to you personally), it also allows a lot of gems to rise to
| people's attention that never would have under the old mass
| culture making system.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's
| attention that never would have under the old mass
| culture making system.
|
| What is such an example? I just want to calibrate what
| you consider a gem that could not have been made in mass
| culture making system.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| One salient example is Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math
| explainer youtube channel and the various other people
| inspired by him (and often using his open-source
| software) to make similar math content on youtube. The
| kinds of math videos he makes are a pretty niche interest
| when you consider percentage of a regional or national TV
| market, and so they didn't end up getting made in the
| 20th century broadcast TV era of mass-culture-making.
|
| There was some math and science content made in that
| regime, some of it even good - but it mostly got made by
| publicly-funded television studios with limited airtime,
| and subject to the inherent constraints of having to make
| mass-market-friendly content. But when you have internet-
| based platforms that allow people starting out as
| hobbyist enthusiasts to broadcast to anyone who can
| understand English in the entire world, you can do things
| like actually put real, difficult equations in your
| videos, and still have that build a sustainable audience.
|
| In general the state of math and science communication on
| the internet is way better than it was under broadcast
| television, and this is one of many ways that the world
| has steadily improved over the past few decades.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math explainer YouTube
| channel
|
| Looks like a great recommendation; hadn't come across it
| before. Thanks!
| a_better_world wrote:
| gems and turds. The far right consipiracy stuff was
| filtered out, likewise the neonazi/technocracy stuff (and
| yes, there is clear historical links between technocracy
| and nazi idologies, see the history of Joshua Norman
| Haldeman (1902-1974), the American-born Canadian maternal
| grandfather of Elon Musk, and why they moved to South
| Africa)
| GJim wrote:
| > I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame
| on social media now existed with television
|
| TV news/documentary broadcasts have a "fairness doctrine"
| in most of the democratic world [1], meaning both sides of
| political discussions must be presented. This is a very
| good bit of legislation which makes television (and radio)
| broadcasts much more impartial and open minded than a
| typical social media bubble.
|
| TV programming might well be "mind rot" to some. But to
| equate TV news/documentaries with social media is a poor
| comparison. One is demonstrably worse.
|
| [1] USA excepted. Obviously.
| graemep wrote:
| > TV news/documentary broadcasts have a "fairness
| doctrine" in most of the democratic world [1], meaning
| both sides of political discussions must be presented.
|
| That is the problem. Most discussions have more than two
| sides. There are lots of shades of opinion and nuances.
| Showing just two viewpoints might not be quite as bad as
| the "memes" and straw man arguments that dominate social
| media, but it is well down the same road.
| GJim wrote:
| I really don't know how to respond to such a naive
| interpretation of what I have written.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| He would write a mea culpa. 1984 is a warning. And that warning
| is playing out in our lives. We are in a post-truth world.
| janwillemb wrote:
| His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is
| impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction
| writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think
| his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the
| prediction of surveillance itself.
| kergonath wrote:
| That's just gate keeping. How hard does science fiction have
| to be in order to be considered worthwhile? Why does it
| matter?
| whizzter wrote:
| Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially
| his later works).
|
| The main thing is that Asimov was more of a bright
| person(mensa member and professor) and good at making
| conjectures about development based on technology and it's
| impact on humans, rather than a great writer per-se
| (there's some famous interview from the 70s that makes a
| fair bit of things that weren't obvious at the time).
|
| Like how he immediately goes to the feasibility of non-
| human total surveillance when concluding that the total
| surveillance of a population on the level of 1984 by humans
| is infeasible.
|
| So this review is to large parts to be taken as an post-
| fact analysis about 1984 both from a standpoint of the
| predictions of it's conjectured future and an attempt to
| see _why_ conjectures failed (much of it, being attributed
| to Orwells need to expose his hatred for how infighting
| perverts socialistic causes).
| ahartmetz wrote:
| About feasibility, did Asimov even read the book
| properly? I remember quite well that telescreens were not
| permanently watched, but that wasn't necessary because
| the consequences of getting caught with "wrongthink" were
| terrible.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Near the end of the book Winston finds out that he was
| watched much more thoroughly than he thought. They read
| his private diary and carefully put the same mote of dust
| on top of the cover so that Winston wouldn't notice it
| had been opened.
| f4c39012 wrote:
| Asimov missed the idea of the panopticon here, whereby
| control is self-enforced by the fear of being caught because
| you can be watched at any time, not all the time
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which
| children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other.
| This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports
| everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
|
| Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a
| system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a
| staggering percentage) reported on each other.
| pavlov wrote:
| And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood
| surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary
| social classes which are perhaps closer to "1984" because they
| are so well established now.
|
| When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same
| people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28
| years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same
| people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for
| 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
|
| Excellent point. Something that refutes another of Asimov's
| critiques in his review, that tyrannies inevitably end
| through tyrants' deaths, or at least become milder in their
| oppression. Admittedly he wrote the review in 1980, back when
| a) the first Kim was still in power and b) no one in the West
| saw North Korea as anything other than an "ordinary"
| Communist state--no awareness of Juche, etc.--but still.
| decimalenough wrote:
| North Korea is rather exceptional though. Few dictatorships
| manage even one smooth succession, let alone two.
| neilellis wrote:
| Monarchies
| chungy wrote:
| It depends on one's definition of dictatorship. I
| personally do not believe, for instance, the British
| Crown is one such instance.
| j-bos wrote:
| Besides that, multiple ways to read this. "Monarchies"
| could've been a reference to pre modern monarchies of
| which many made it through at least 3 successions. Or as
| a correction to the upper comment, saying that the Kim's
| are more monarchy than plain dictatorship.
| pmontra wrote:
| The British Crown had to concede some rights centuries
| ago, or there would have been civil wars and probably no
| more crown. Dear Leaders are the ones that don't have to
| concede anything, yet.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > or there would have been civil wars
|
| Would have been? There were.
| ses1984 wrote:
| A lot of monarchies aren't really stable across two or
| more successions either.
| fransje26 wrote:
| No. East Germany did not start existing with the Berlin Wall.
| The system was in place well before that, and so was the
| Stasi.
|
| It spanned more than 40 years, and was absolutely multi-
| generational.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| In hindsight East Germany took a lot of inspiration from
| Nazi Germany.
| calini wrote:
| This also happened heavily under the Romanian communist regime.
| My parents were first hand witness to that.
| rpigab wrote:
| > Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in
| credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards
| 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do
| not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very
| well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most
| computerised nations in today's world are also the least
| tyrannical.
|
| China begs to differ.
| internet_points wrote:
| Asimov comes off as incredibly naive.
| elteto wrote:
| After reading Asimov's review, I think the book has aged much
| better to be honest.
| hleszek wrote:
| This is still so relevant now:
|
| > This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical
| proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always
| quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point
| to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to
| the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any
| politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is
| only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully
| enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie
| against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the
| facts.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have
| domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's
| good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a
| different one. We use justifications which make sense to us
| that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's
| not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything.
| Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Orwell and Asimov are talking about something entirely
| different than drawing flawed conclusions due to inexperience
| --they're talking about people with access to the facts and
| choosing not to believe them.
|
| For instance, Alex Pretti's murder was recorded from several
| angles and yet the American right still broadly claims that
| he attacked the agents, that he pulled his gun on them, etc.
| You don't need to be an expert in policing or anything else
| to watch those videos and see that those narratives are
| plainly false. That's of course only one example, but there
| are many others.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| These Minessota videos are classic examples of what Scott
| Adams used to call "two different movies being played on
| the same screen", in this case quite literally. From the
| point of view of a left leaning person, that movie shows a
| man being assassinated for no reason at all, nothing
| justify what happened. From the point of view of a right
| leaning person, Alex Pretti was actively interfering with
| law enforcement, and he entered a conflict situation while
| carrying a gun. If a cop is in the act of fighting you, and
| see a gun, you carry the risk of being shot, it's just
| reality. The right leaning person, just based on these
| facts, already reduces the charges from murder to
| manslaughter, max. Two movies on one screen, and there's
| NOTHING rational that can be said to change the mind of
| anyone. Everybody is watching the same damn screen, but the
| movies are completely different.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| You seem to be using the terms "left leaning person" and
| "right leaning person" when you actually mean "normal
| people" and "sociopaths." Left and right have nothing to
| do with it.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Yep, no rational argument can be used to make you (or me)
| see the same movie.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| List the rational arguments in favor of the so-called
| "right-leaning" point of view (OP's term, not mine) with
| respect to the Pretti killing. Spoiler: there are no such
| arguments, effective or otherwise. To apologists it looks
| like a Rorschach test; to normal people it looks like a
| snuff film, brought to us by the same studio that is now
| distributing child pornography.
|
| Meanwhile, it's possible to favor free enterprise,
| (genuinely) smaller government, low taxes, free trade,
| and other so-called "right-leaning" perspectives
| _without_ joining a slack-jawed personality cult that
| demands that you deny the evidence of your own eyes.
| brabel wrote:
| In my country, lifting a finger against an officer on
| duty will land you in big trouble. If you got a gun on
| you and you resist arrest, like happened in this case,
| you are absolutely getting shot. I can't really
| understand you Americans. What do you think an armed
| person reacting to arrest is going to do with that gun
| given the chance? If you were a cop would you take
| chances?? If you did you wouldn't be here complaining
| about anything as you would be dead.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 1. In the United States, we have Constitutional rights,
| including the right to carry a gun with proper permits.
| Like other rights, the state can't murder you for having
| a gun on your person, but if they have a credible reason
| to think that you are an immediate threat, they can shoot
| you. The legal standard for "immediate threat" does not
| cover this scenario because (1) Pretti wasn't resisting
| (2) the police stripped him of his gun before they
| executed him and (3) the agents approached Pretti for no
| reason at all; Pretti was clearly peacefully recording
| with his hands clearly visible.
|
| > If you were a cop would you take chances
|
| I wouldn't be a cop if I was afraid that every person
| with a cell phone might shoot me with a gun, or if I was
| afraid that every soccer mom in a car might try to run me
| over. And while American policing is riddled with
| accountability problems, it's important to emphasize that
| the crushing majority of American police can manage much
| riskier circumstances without murdering anyone--it seems
| to be exclusively the agencies under the Department of
| Homeland Security that behave like secret police on a
| regular basis.
| snayan wrote:
| The sociopaths you refer to see themselves as the normal
| people and you as the sociopath.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (Shrug) Nobody thinks they're the bad guys, including the
| actual bad guys.
|
| As usual, it's not hard to tell who the bad guys are:
| they're the ones who initiate violence.
| dotancohen wrote:
| So you consider people with different values then you
| sociopaths? You sound very intolerant.
| srean wrote:
| Depends on what those values are. Epstein had different
| values than I do.
|
| I don't think parent commenter is saying that leaning
| right is sociopathic, but that some people try to pass
| their sociopathy as a simple act of being right leaning.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yes. Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR:
| tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.
|
| Glancing at your user page, this _should_ be an exercise
| in preaching to the choir. You do understand that the
| only reason the Republicans in the US support Israel is
| because embracing fundamentalist Christian eschatology
| gets them votes they don 't have to work for. Right?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If the "different values" are whether or not the state
| should be allowed to execute someone for peacefully
| exercising their right to film agents in public, then
| yeah that constitutes sociopathy in my mind. I'm okay
| with being intolerant of such sociopaths. You may also
| find my distaste for Nazism to be "intolerant". Guilty as
| charged, I guess.
| srean wrote:
| These so called right leaning people were, in the recent
| past, crying themselves hoarse that they have all the
| right and moral prerogative to carry arms at a protest.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Having the right to do something does not make it safe.
|
| Americans have the right to carry a pistol. But carrying
| a pistol while heckling police officers and touching a
| police officer who is performing their duty, sounds
| deadly to me.
|
| Can we agree that the deceased had a right to carry a
| pistol? Can we agree that the deceased had been heckling
| police officers? Can we agree that the deceased had
| touched a police officer?
|
| Nothing he did warranted death. But he did choose to put
| himself in an extremely dangerous position, moreso by
| touching a police officer than by carrying a pistol. But
| in any case don't carry a pistol when you are out looking
| for confrontation, especially with police. Even if you're
| right, you're still dead.
| srean wrote:
| A 'right' in this context by definition means government
| (agencied) will not persecute you for the activity
| protected by this right. If that's not the case you don't
| have the right at all, period.
|
| Note though, I do not agree with this particular right
| (that of bearing arms, visibly so, at a protest), but the
| so called right leaning people are very enamored by this
| one and were very vocal about it just yesterday. Suddenly
| those same people seem to be equivocating about it now.
|
| The people who were supportive of bringing assault rifles
| to contentious public rallies are now falling over
| themselves to blame Alex Pretti.
|
| Touching a 'police officer' had nothing to do with the
| killing. Had he touched his own behind the same thing
| could have transpired. What killed him is the political
| support for ICE to be beyond accountability and the
| license for violence.
|
| In this atmosphere anyone killed by ICE is automatically
| a homegrown terrorist, if by nothing else, by
| presidential fiat.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Even if you're right, you're still dead.
|
| Yes, this is the entire point: the left is saying "the
| government shouldn't murder citizens for exercising their
| legal rights", and the right is saying "if you exercise
| your legal rights, it's your fault if the government
| murders you" (or at least "that's the risk you run").
|
| If American patriotism has anything at all to do with
| valuing freedom from tyranny and oppression, then the
| right-wing mindset ("you might have the 'legal right' to
| film an officer, but the state might murder you for it")
| seems aggressively un-American. Specifically, if you have
| "the right to do X but the government might murder you
| for doing X" then you don't really have the right to do X
| by definition.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > The right leaning person, just based on these facts...
|
| To be clear, those aren't facts, that's _delusion_.
| Pretti _objectively did not interfere_ at all. He was
| carrying a gun--that's a fact--but he didn't interfere.
| The federal agents _approached him_ and pushed him back,
| and he retreated the entire time.
|
| Moreover, a right leaning person wouldn't delude
| themselves in this way except that they had previously
| coded the federal agents as "their side" and Pretti as
| "the other side"--if Pretti was a J6er and the ICE agent
| was a Capitol Hill police officer, our hypothetical
| right-winger would have been outraged at the killing _as
| would everyone else_ (assuming it was equally as
| unjustified as the Pretti murder). We don't even need a
| hypothetical, because the right was outraged that the
| J6ers were prosecuted and sentenced, and then jubilant
| when Trump pardoned them.
|
| I'm also obligated to point out that I'm painting with a
| broad brush here. A small share of the right have,
| however reluctantly or timidly, spoken out against the
| mainstream right-wing claims that Pretti was doing
| something wrong. For example, Rand Paul gave an interview
| stating that Pretti was clearly retreating and there was
| no cause for the killing, and even MTG said that the
| right would be up in arms (no pun intended) if the roles
| were reversed. Kudos to those on the right who have the
| bravery to say obvious truths in times such as these, I
| guess.
| itsalwaysgood wrote:
| That isn't human nature at all, that is a feature of our
| economy.
|
| The human nature bit is that we are inclined to follow
| conviction: belief in an idea. And if someone says something
| with conviction, whether true or not, our first instinct is
| to believe them, maybe even trust them.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I'm often baffled by how people online find a tone of
| disagreement to agree with people.
| itsalwaysgood wrote:
| Sorry, didn't mean to offend you. My tone is bad.
|
| I just wanted to make a distinction between human nature
| and the benefits of specialization within an economy. You
| mentioned being an expert in a single domain, which I
| interpreted as specialized labor, as in an economy
|
| An economy isn't really related to human nature,
| directly.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| No more relevant today than it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago tbh
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Gravity has always been an important factor in our lives, but
| I'd say it's even more relevant when we're actively being
| spaghettified by a black hole.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| It's definitely interesting to see what ideas 1984 had that
| were salient to Asimov writing in 1980 - and also to see
| which of _those_ ideas still have relevance in 2026, when the
| world has changed considerably again from when Asimov was
| writing.
| GJim wrote:
| You are being downvoted by those who see the world solely
| though American eyes and with only recent experience of
| American politics to draw on.
|
| I know HN is USA centric, but bugger me! I didn't expect to
| see such a narrow viewing of the world stage in the voting on
| here.
|
| EDIT: And I'm getting drive-by downvotes for pointing this
| out! Nice.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I can see your argument but I'm non american and think you
| underestimate the impact of USA on global stage.
|
| It was(?) de facto the most powerful democracy with most
| innovation and broad influence over the world, USAID and so
| on. Every dictator and tsar had to count with values like
| freedom of information and tolerance and following laws and
| trading instead of fighting.
|
| Now it's still maybe powerful but those values and
| influence coming from it are changing very quickly and that
| is super recent
| zhoujing204 wrote:
| Dictators are absolutely terrified of the paper trail. This is
| the entire reason for existence of the Great Firewall. The CCP
| invests heavily in sanitizing imported literature and curating
| the information supply to maintain cognitive capture over the
| populace.
|
| We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look
| at the library purges in conservative states and the push to
| co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the
| historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental
| substrate of free speech.
| riffraff wrote:
| But Trump and his administration also prove what GP is
| saying. Few care about the truth.
|
| Trump states obvious lies so blatant ("prices will go down
| 200%") that anyone who cares could tell they are untruth
| without needing to look up any paper trail, but it does not
| matter.
|
| Mike Johnson just quoted St Paul as saying you should respect
| the authority forgetting that _the Romans beheaded him_. And
| it 's not like the Bible isn't available widely.
| rsynnott wrote:
| That's the interesting bit; Winston's job turns out to be
| largely redundant. You don't need to hide the evidence that
| the chocolate ration used to be higher; if a sufficiently
| charismatic person with sufficiently stupid hair says that
| it has increased, a lot of people will believe that.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| How many Americans give a shit about history?
| squarefoot wrote:
| People is kept away from details by shortening their
| attention span with the production of continuous pervasive
| stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently
| stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings,
| let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and
| people consuming them to start talking about the next event
| without further exploring more important ones.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| put another way, they don't care about history because
| every economic actor in the economy is trying to keep
| them distracted -- so that they don't learn the history
|
| the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Exactly. Interesting that both orwell and azimov were wrong
| in different ways. Also azimov seems unaware of the Fabian
| link to the title which is surely a factor in the origin.
| pcf wrote:
| Because it's timeless, not just "relevant now".
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| >Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to
| keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. In
| fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on
| and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of
| consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping
| the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in
| being. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the
| result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)
|
| >In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-
| free as compared with the decades before it. There have been
| local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not
| required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources.
| That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in
| population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.
|
| ...
|
| >He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability
| or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations
| who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.
|
| I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact
| that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about
| doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we
| didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard
| to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan
| rhyming with Orwell a bit.
|
| And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov
| is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil
| stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.
| epistasis wrote:
| Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy
| insecurity from the oil crisis of the time.
|
| We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy
| scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from
| getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.
|
| Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought
| that was mostly a leftist problem.
| just-the-wrk wrote:
| Or the wealth could accumulate in the hands of a few
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats
| needing to direct the anger of the populace away from
| themselves. We have this today with government propaganda
| stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from
| their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when
| it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
| tokai wrote:
| Isn't Asimov mistaking the Party's self rationalization and use
| of war (that might not even still be going on) as a statement
| of Orwell beliefs?
| kergonath wrote:
| I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit
| myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he
| misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and
| that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and
| methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing
| exactly the same thing right now.
|
| Amusingly, when he writes
|
| > Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which
| children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other.
| This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports
| everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
|
| I wonder what he'd think of the Stasi, which had a network of
| informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other
| cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.
|
| Also, when he wrote
|
| > Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he
| would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
|
| Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually
| mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don't know
| _when_ someone is looking was chilling. I'm not sure that would
| be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book
| it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the
| party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.
|
| And, finally:
|
| > George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private
| feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the
| future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing
| a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the
| world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
|
| Science fiction does not _forecast_. FFS. Even him surely could
| not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This
| branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it
| to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute
| totalitarian government with just enough technology to be
| dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi
| as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on
| 1984 for not being sciencey enough.
| slidehero wrote:
| Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched
| contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov
| never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked
| him.
| tehnub wrote:
| I think Asimov is right that 1984 was not intended as a
| forecast but rather a depiction of Stalinism with British
| characteristics, so to speak.
|
| >In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it
| is very bad science fiction.
|
| Based on this quote and others, it seems Asimov didn't believe
| that Orwell intended the novel as science fiction, although
| others categorize it that way. I would say he's attacking the
| interpretation of it as science fiction, but it veers into an
| attack on Orwell, which is unfortunate.
|
| You write
|
| >Science fiction does not _forecast_.
|
| Not to be overly pedantic but to be fair to Asimov, he didn't
| exactly say science fiction _necessarily_ does that, but rather
| it's a knack related to science fiction.
| bananaflag wrote:
| I love Asimov for the same reason I love Orwell, namely clear
| 1940s-style writing (which I've also seen in Lassie Come Home by
| Eric Knight), so I find it funny and sad that one is criticizing
| the other.
| elephanlemon wrote:
| Interesting how pedantic he is!
|
| > Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every
| technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero
| writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get
| the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the
| beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib
| instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.
|
| > Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was
| coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This
| means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a
| real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is,
| however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old
| enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they
| scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
|
| > This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a
| past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the
| steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat
| goose quill.
| sdwr wrote:
| I don't think it's pedantic, he's trying to make a broad point
| about his mentality, using the detail as the defining example
| sifar wrote:
| Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again. It feels strange - almost as if
| Asimov hated Orwell. So many personal attacks.
|
| And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.
|
| Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov
| miss it ? "Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it
| would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984
| as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not
| see that it means us, too."
|
| " Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he
| would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own
| computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and
| so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered
| imaginations. "
|
| Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical
| celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.
| melagonster wrote:
| >Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any
| weakening of the feminine stereotype of 1949.
|
| This is funny for me. The most common type of criticize for
| Asimov's work is that people complain Asimov did not add enough
| women in his book. The world is changing so quickly.
| harry8 wrote:
| I enjoyed reading "Foundation" recently. The total lack of
| female characters was jarring to say the least. Worth the read
| if you haven't. Not much like the AppleTV series.
| globular-toast wrote:
| You can't just stop with the first book. Keep reading...
| gerikson wrote:
| Or don't. There's so much more better SF out there.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The point was more that the female characters turn up in
| books two and three. Three in particular.
|
| If you like SF you can't go wrong reading all of Asimov
| IMO. The entire Robots/Empire/Foundation series is
| fantastic. It doesn't mean you can't also read other,
| "better" SF either. Asimov's main SF work will take a few
| months to read at most.
| gerikson wrote:
| I have read a lot of Asimov. That's why I said there's
| better stuff out there.
|
| Even his contempories were better - Bester and Simak run
| rings around him.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Feel free to make more recommendations. I record every
| single one I get and usually read them eventually.
| willis936 wrote:
| Are you referring to the literal planet rather than a
| woman? That character felt particularly of self insert
| fantasy (oo a hot 20 year old in love with the aged
| professor).
|
| Regardless, stopping at the first book is a good
| recommendation. Asimov demonstrated he didn't understand
| what made his own work interesting. Granted mystery boxes
| are hard, but he took an immediate about-face on
| psychohistory and retconned any bit of intrigue with
| rather vanilla stuff. The first book is outstanding.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I read books because I enjoy them. I enjoy reading about
| hot 20 year olds and big breasted women in space
| actually. Women are allowed to have _50 Shades_ , I'm
| allowed to enjoy books too.
| willis936 wrote:
| You are. And I'm allowed to read into the author's
| psychology when they wear it on their shoulder. And I'm
| also allowed to critique the author when they
| misunderstand their work and write rambling, uninspired
| sequels that ruin the original work.
|
| Lucas and Disney couldn't help but copy even these bad
| parts of Foundation in the Star Wars prequels and
| sequels.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > ruin the original work
|
| I've never understood this. The beauty of recorded media
| is authors cannot ruin or revoke their work, assuming no
| actual censorship, of course (copyright can also be a
| problem). Just ignore the subsequent works if you don't
| like them. This is the first time I'm hearing about
| people only reading the first _Foundation_ book but it 's
| definitely worth doing some quick checks before
| dedicating one's finite time to
| reading/watching/listening to anything.
| willis936 wrote:
| The trilogy, prequels, and sequels are all "canon" and
| retcon the most interesting concepts of the original book
| as ruses, conspiracies, and lies. This is unambiguously a
| ruining of the original because the author went out of
| their way to mute the concepts rather than explore them.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Writers are part of the world they live in.
|
| Take Dune. After the third book it gets weird. But
| Herbert was a white man in the 1970s- ofcourse the books
| become degenerate and druggie.
| int_19h wrote:
| Try "The End of Eternity" to see how Asimov dealt with female
| characters when they were there...
| Animats wrote:
| Asimov in 1980 didn't have access to "Orwell, the Lost Writings",
| published in 1985. That details Eric Blair's ("Orwell" is a
| pseudonym) jobs during WWII, mostly at the British Ministry of
| Information. "1984"'s details are partly autobiographical. One of
| Blair's jobs was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English
| for broadcast to the colonies, primarily India and Hong Kong. He
| found that this was a political act. Squeezing news down to a
| 1000 word vocabulary required removing political ambiguity. It's
| hard to prevaricate in Basic English, which has a very concrete
| vocabulary. Hence Newspeak.
|
| The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The
| rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of
| Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B",
| and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin,
| cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.
|
| "1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.
| int0x29 wrote:
| Room 101 is the conference room where he sat through tedious
| meetings while working for the BBC.
| rottc0dd wrote:
| I really loved Pynchon's introduction to 1984[1] in new Penguin
| edition.
|
| [1]: https://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-
| essa...
| fortran77 wrote:
| Even today, many people--in the United States!--have accepted
| Soviet propaganda hook, line and sinker. 51% of New Yorkers, for
| example. Nobody has learned anything from Orwell's book.
| kergonath wrote:
| 1984 is not about communism or nazism. It's about
| totalitarianism. Orwell himself was a socialist and his ideas
| would today be well left of Mamdani's.
| internet_points wrote:
| Even today in the United States people voted for someone who
| actively tries to dismantle the legal system, pushes for more
| control in the hands of the executive powers, uses the military
| against its own citizens, constantly questions election
| integrity, emphasizes loyalty over free speech, encourages a
| "Great Leader" cult of personality, attacks political opponents
| with all possible means, promotes isolationism, militarizes law
| enforcement, the list goes on. All these are hallmarks of
| totalitarianism - which is what 1984 is all about.
| jibal wrote:
| Many people are shallow thinkers with no intellectual integrity
| who have never learned much of anything and say the most
| incredibly foolish, ignorant, and dishonest things.
| rexpop wrote:
| What propaganda? What are you talking about?
| shmerl wrote:
| _> He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a
| plausible future_
|
| I think he had enough of it to foresee it for any authoritarian
| regime. You can find examples of what he describes today.
| BoredGuyAtWork wrote:
| I loved the Foundation series and Isaac Asimov was definitely my
| most read science fiction author as a kid, but damn - my
| estimation of Asimov as a man just fuckin plummeted. He comes
| across like a whiny nerd. He's upset that 1984 gets such acclaim
| in "his" area of expertise, science fiction. And how dare this
| non science fiction guy step foot in his domain. If 1984 weren't
| set in the future, he wouldn't have any gripes with it, I'm sure.
|
| The one thing Asimov gives Orwell credit for is predicting that
| there would be three separate great powers? Like, what? The other
| nations don't matter at all. We're not even sure they really
| exist or not. Or how he complains that Orwell used a missile
| strike, instead of calling it what, a 2X00 Plasma Fueled Missile
| Strike? It's not about the missile strike. It's about the fear
| the missile strike incites into people. People afraid are easy to
| control.
|
| Or about how the warring nations didn't use nukes. Like, there's
| no way Asimov didn't understand that it was probably not even the
| other nations that were responsible, but rather the party itself,
| right? But that's what it sounds like. It reminds me of how in
| the Foundation series, one of the characters has an "atomic"
| wristwatch. Like, you can tell that Asimov thought that would be
| possible in the future and would be cool, and just had to include
| it. But really, who cares. As if cool gadgets or what people
| might use in the future is what makes or breaks science fiction.
| Not to mention how outdated an atomic watch feels now.
|
| Asimov had great ideas, but his actual writing ability doesn't
| hold a candle to George Orwell's. Orwell was a true literary
| master. Asimov was a very creative scientist, with a lot of ideas
| in his head, and he successfully put them to paper.
| kleiba wrote:
| _> those controlling the government kept themselves in power
| bybrute force, by distorting the truth, by continually rewriting
| history, by mesmerising the people generally_
|
| Sound familiar?
| kavalg wrote:
| > Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand.
|
| ... but the latter may greatly benefit from the former
| kleiba wrote:
| _> This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping
| everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all
| times means that some other person must be doing the watching at
| all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing
| so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of
| interpreting gesture and facial expression._
|
| https://theresanaiforthat.com/
| fake-name wrote:
| You don't even need an AI.
|
| This is such a core misunderstanding that Asimov seems to have,
| and it kind of kills his entire analysis for me.
|
| The assumption is that only some small fraction of a fraction
| of the people who _could_ be surveilled at any time _are_ being
| surveilled.
|
| The crux of the thing is that _everyone_ COULD be under
| surveillance at any time, so in effect everyone must _behave_
| as if they are being observed because they do not know they are
| not.
| thombat wrote:
| Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in
| the first chapter:
|
| The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any
| sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low
| whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he
| remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque
| commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of
| course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at
| any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought
| Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It
| was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the
| time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever
| they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that
| became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made
| was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement
| scrutinized.
|
| Remarkable that Asimov could overlook this.
| cornholio wrote:
| The review seems completely consumed by professional
| bitterness to the point where it becomes laughable. By the
| 1980s the methods of KGB, Stasi, Securitate etc. were well
| known in the west; how can he put this on paper and not
| realize he was being a complete fool:
|
| > _[the governmnet in 1984] has a system of volunteer spies
| in which children report on their parents, and neighbours
| on each other. This cannot possibly work well since
| eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to
| be abandoned._
|
| In fact, the human powered system of total state
| surveillance worked remarkably well, it was one of the few
| things that did work in most communist countries - because
| it was paramount for state security and enormous resources
| were dedicated to it.
|
| In every block of flats, every factory floor, every friend
| circle there was an informer who wrote down weekly reports
| about who is making political jokes, who is listening to
| Radio Free Europe, who is planning to flee abroad or has
| access to contraband meat and razor blades and so on. These
| informers were themselves controlled by blackmail and fear,
| were fanatical supporters or were simply doing the work in
| exchange for favors or goods. Any individual harboring
| intentions to overthrow the system was thus isolated, he
| knew that any such talk would quickly get him sidelined
| from his job, evicted from his flat, sometimes declared
| mentally unstable and committed, and finally, if nothing
| else worked, disappeared.
|
| The entire review reads like a clumsy attempt to soil
| Orwell's legacy, that was already, by that time, shaping to
| be far more significant than Asimov's own.
| thombat wrote:
| The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying
| observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There
| was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the
| whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi
| officer turning against the system from a crisis of
| conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such
| long wolves they took the simple expedient of always
| having two officers performing the surveillance, so not
| just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were
| monitored.
|
| Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as
| was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the
| restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very
| much a price they were willing to pay.
| Twisell wrote:
| No it's a core misunderstanding of the commenters (and AI ads
| placement). The quote is biased because it miss the next part
| of Asimov's essay.
|
| > Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he
| would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our
| own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit
| files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984,
| except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not
| necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well
| without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most
| computerised nations in today's world are also the least
| tyrannical.
|
| Ok for that last sentence guess we'll have to check if what
| was true in 1980 still is in 2020's.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Fully agree with how it seems Asimov has misunderstood
| something, or perhaps been myopic about seeing the world of
| 1984 with commitment .. another thing that killed his
| analysis for me was that he didn't seem to understand the
| immensely dire conditions of 1984, vis a vis low quality
| razors, etc., nor that the sociological aspects he implies as
| banal (implying orwells disregard for proles) were as a
| consequence of years of brutal war. Asimov didn't seem to
| want to scratch deeper into 1984 - he was, I believe, more
| responding to the world of 1980, which was after all an
| entirely different yet strikingly similar world to the novel,
| kind of like political parties.
|
| I have respect for both authors, but for sure I'd rather have
| a drink and share a sausage with Orwell at a party than wall-
| flower with the collective absorbing Asimovs rants didactic.
| Pretty sure the gin'd be cheap anyway.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Well that was fun to read Asimov critiquing a book so harshly
| zelos wrote:
| It's been many years since I read 1984, but this seems wrong:
|
| _" To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor fortune
| could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever
| increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big
| Brother."_
|
| Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there
| was no central dictator, just the system.
| lijf wrote:
| " As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use
| many words rather than few, long words rather than short, to
| extend rather than to reduce. Every leader of inadequate
| education or limited intelligence hides behind exuberant
| inebriation of loquacity."
| banku_brougham wrote:
| He makes a lot of great points, but I vaguely feel he missed the
| point of the book. I guess he "just couldn't like get into it
| man."
|
| >In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes
| on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of
| consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping
| the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in
| being.
| sillywabbit wrote:
| The editing of the dictionary in that book is more troublesome
| than the surveillance state and propaganda campaigns.
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