All that she did was transport these horrors into a scenario close enough to 1980s America to make her readers uncomfortable. When critics described Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale as science fiction, the author countered that everything that occurred in her near-future theocracy Gilead had already happened in America’s past, or was still happening in someone else’s present. Photo: PAĮvery great dystopia exists in that unnerving territory between fact and fiction. They found that Orwell’s concepts were all too relevant to their own restricted lives. Readers behind the Iron Curtain – where the book was banned and possession of a smuggled copy could lead to a prison sentence – certainly didn’t categorise it as fiction. The phrases that Orwell invented were brilliantly, unforgettably new – Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak, the Thought Police – but they were all satirical exaggerations of existing totalitarianism. It was the first dystopian novel written with the full knowledge that dystopia was real.
Read more: Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff, review: countless details that leave you incredulous, all over again How did these tyrannies take root and could something similar – or even worse – emerge elsewhere, in countries that assumed their institutions and liberties were safe? From the very start, it was his way of making sense of the totalitarian regimes that were tormenting Europe: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Orwell would not have gone to such punishing lengths to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four if it had been merely fiction. The cover of the first edition of ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ For Orwell, the book was nothing less than an obsession. Its author died less than eight months later at the age of 46. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949, to instant acclaim and alarm. By 1948, he was so determined to finish the book that he refused to retreat to a sanatorium to seek sorely needed treatment for his tuberculosis, a decision which probably doomed his chances of recovery. In fact, virtually everything he wrote as a journalist during that time had some relevance to his novel. By 1948, Orwell was so determined to finish the book that he refused to retreat to a sanatorium to seek treatment for his tuberculosis, a decision which probably doomed his chances of recovery
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