'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Nineteen Eighty-Four about?
Winston Smith rewrites history at the Ministry of Truth, hides his diary from the telescreen, and commits the irreversible act of falling in love — with Julia, with the past, with the possibility that two plus two makes four. Airstrip One's apparatus closes around him with the patience of something that was never not watching: O'Brien, the Inner Party confessor who wrote the book on the opposition because he is the opposition's author too; Room 101, which contains the worst thing in the world, individually fitted; and Newspeak, the language being pared until dissent has no words left to think in. The ending is the genre's most famous defeat, and the appendix on Newspeak — written in the past tense — its most argued-over crumb of hope.
Why it matters
The most influential dystopia ever written: its vocabulary is the global currency of anti-authoritarianism, its surveillance state the permanent reference point, and its sales still spike with the headlines.
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