1984 remains a significant work of speculative fiction, and offers a sketchy but powerful portrait of a totalitarian world.
Have others set novels / movies specifically within the 1984 universe? I expect there have been lots of borrowings of elements of the story, but any actually set in or building on what Orwell depicted?
That would be double-plus good.
1985 - The Death of Big Brother
1985 is a sequel to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Written by Hungarian author György Dalos, originally published in 1983, this novel begins with the death of Big Brother and reflects an intermediate period between 1984 and a more optimistic future characterized with a decline in orthodoxy of the totalitarian system, struggles of the ensuing powers and the near destruction of the Oceania air force by Eurasia.
Critic Pat Harrington found the novel's emphasis on the Thought Police ...
Spoons
April 16, 2023, 5:24am
3
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but the forerunner of 1984 is We , by Yevgeny Zamiatin:
We (Russian: Мы, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York, with the original Russian text first published in 1952. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell said that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly d
From the item:
Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it. Orwell is reported as “saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel”. Brown writes that for Orwell and certain others, We “appears to have been the crucial literary experience”. Shane states that “Zamyatin’s influence on Orwell is beyond dispute”. Robert Russell, in an overview of the criticism of We , concludes that “1984 shares so many features with We that there can be no doubt about its general debt to it”; but that there is a minority of critics who view the similarities between We and Nineteen Eighty-Four as “entirely superficial”. Further, Russell finds that “Orwell’s novel is both bleaker and more topical than Zamyatin’s, lacking entirely that ironic humour that pervades the Russian work”.
I dunno. Having read both 1984 and We , I find the latter much more disturbing than 1984 .
Smapti
April 16, 2023, 5:33am
4
There’s this one, which rewrites the book to set it ten years later, in which the author argues that the rise of the internet will put an end to totalitarianism. (Not looking like such a good call in retrospect.)