1984

By George Orwell

Categories: Literature & Fiction

George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, imagines a future in which Britain, renamed Airstrip One, is a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania. The ruling Party, led by Big Brother, watches everyone, rewrites history and wages perpetual war. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, altering old records to match the Party's version of events. Privately he hates the regime, and he begins to keep a forbidden diary. The novel explores surveillance, propaganda and the manipulation of truth.

Recommended by 8 people

• David Sacks: “As I've said many times before, the biggest risk of AI isn't James Cameron's The Terminator, it's George Orwell's 1984.”
• Richard Branson
• Vinod Khosla: “Memories! Was required reading (along with Kafka) in undergraduate engineering school”
• Jocko Willink
• Jordan Peterson
• Marc Andreessen: “Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell's \"1984\" as an instruction manual.”
• Ben Shapiro: “But what gives 1984 its power is the human drama at its center: the drama of an individual human mind, assaulted by the forces of government and culture, driven into embrace of the unthinkable precisely because it is unthinkable.”
• Neil deGrasse Tyson: “I saw the movie 1984 recently. Not a very good movie. The book is better than the movie”