alt.hn

2/5/2026 at 9:39:57 PM

Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)

 https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

by doruk101

2/5/2026 at 10:47:13 PM

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.

by hleszek

2/6/2026 at 5:19:06 PM

Because it's timeless, not just "relevant now".

by pcf

2/6/2026 at 6:31:59 AM

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.

by zhoujing204

2/7/2026 at 3:12:34 AM

You sure aggressive propaganda and espionage from the west aren't part of the reason for it? What sort of "cognitive capture" is necessary to maintain control of their population right now? The Chinese are often painted as brainwashed ideological drones in the west, and it says more about us that we tend to believe it than it does about them. You can download RedNote and talk to people in Xinjiang. You can travel there and talk to people in person. Mao is arguably deceased.

by ted_bunny

2/6/2026 at 7:10:19 AM

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.

by riffraff

2/6/2026 at 10:17:27 AM

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.

by rsynnott

2/6/2026 at 11:49:35 AM

How many Americans give a shit about history?

by TitaRusell

2/7/2026 at 3:00:57 AM

All the smart and informed Americans…

by Recurecur

2/6/2026 at 10:28:56 AM

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.

by squarefoot

2/6/2026 at 4:22:57 PM

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

by red-iron-pine

2/7/2026 at 3:04:59 AM

Hence the movement to eliminate the “Department of Education”, which at this point would be better named the “Department of Intentional Ignorance”.

That’s despite spending more per child than any other country in the world.

by Recurecur

2/6/2026 at 10:27:33 AM

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.

by nobodywillobsrv

2/6/2026 at 1:09:03 AM

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.

by riazrizvi

2/6/2026 at 3:01:35 PM

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.

by itsalwaysgood

2/6/2026 at 7:37:02 PM

I'm often baffled by how people online find a tone of disagreement to agree with people.

by riazrizvi

2/6/2026 at 8:33:34 PM

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.

by itsalwaysgood

2/6/2026 at 1:32:39 AM

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.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 7:19:31 AM

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.

by kikokikokiko

2/6/2026 at 11:11:47 AM

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.

by srean

2/6/2026 at 2:31:33 PM

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.

by dotancohen

2/6/2026 at 3:41:43 PM

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.

by srean

2/6/2026 at 11:31:06 PM

In this specific case, considering the video evidence, I agree with you 100%. There was no valid no justifiable reason to murder that man.

I still think, in general, when going out looking for confrontation (whether that be against the police or even just a bar fight) that the firearms should be left at home.

by dotancohen

2/7/2026 at 8:50:22 AM

In complete agreement regarding carrying fire arms to an emotionally charged protest.

by srean

2/7/2026 at 2:06:53 AM

> I still think, in general, when going out looking for confrontation (whether that be against the police or even just a bar fight) that the firearms should be left at home.

How do you exercise your 2A rights without your firearms? If you leave them at home, then you aren’t exercising the right, and if you show up in public with a firearm staying out of the way of law enforcement with your hands visible the entire time, then you are exercising those rights i.e. “looking for confrontation”.

In general, I think it’s nonsensical that people can exercise their rights but not in a way that a tyrannical regime might persecute them for—by definition, that’s not exercising rights it’s yielding them to the government.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 9:55:46 PM

> 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.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 11:34:11 PM

Lots of things that are legal are deadly.

For what it's worth, I don't even see this specific incident as government persecution. It looks like plain murder. Murder by a government employee, but murder nonetheless.

by dotancohen

2/7/2026 at 2:12:20 AM

We seem to agree that it’s dangerous to assert your rights to a tyrannical regime, and that in this case the regime murdered the person peacefully asserting his rights.

I think we are disagreed about whether someone can safely assert their rights before a tyrannical regime. If you could do it safely, the regime wouldn’t be tyrannical. If you “assert your rights” but only in a way that is safe from reprisal by a tyrannical regime, then you aren’t asserting your rights, you are letting the government infringe on your rights.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 7:33:54 AM

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.

by CamperBob2

2/6/2026 at 7:39:42 AM

Yep, no rational argument can be used to make you (or me) see the same movie.

by kikokikokiko

2/6/2026 at 4:13:50 PM

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.

by CamperBob2

2/6/2026 at 8:53:21 PM

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.

by brabel

2/6/2026 at 10:02:49 PM

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.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 1:45:52 PM

The sociopaths you refer to see themselves as the normal people and you as the sociopath.

by snayan

2/6/2026 at 4:16:18 PM

(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.

by CamperBob2

2/6/2026 at 2:33:22 PM

So you consider people with different values then you sociopaths? You sound very intolerant.

by dotancohen

2/6/2026 at 3:48:05 PM

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.

by srean

2/6/2026 at 10:08:27 PM

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.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 4:13:23 PM

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?

by CamperBob2

2/6/2026 at 11:27:23 PM

No, actually, it seems to me that Americans support Israel because we have the same system of values (democracy, human rights, rule of law), and have the same enemies who wish to destroy both our societies.

by dotancohen

2/7/2026 at 8:28:11 AM

> enemies who wish to destroy both our societies.

How can you say this, out loud, and not immediately hear yourself as the villain? This is such a cartoonishly deluded and paranoid belief, it truly boggles the mind.

by Timwi

2/6/2026 at 9:46:15 PM

> 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.

by throwaway894345

2/6/2026 at 3:00:34 AM

[flagged]

by webdoodle

2/6/2026 at 5:20:48 AM

If you can’t tell the difference between the Republicans and Democrats on February 5th, 2026 then you are the problem.

by mulmen

2/6/2026 at 4:57:56 AM

When people loudly assert there's no difference between the left and right in this era, I don't know how to give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it more generous to assume they're being disingenuous and too smart to actually believe what they're saying? Or vice versa?

by add-sub-mul-div

2/6/2026 at 5:45:53 AM

There is of course a huge difference between left and right, but the democratic party is actually center-right, so...

Previous poster didn't say there's no difference between left and right, they said both parties are bought and paid for by fascists, which is pretty much true, thanks to Citizens United v FEC which passed the last time democrats had control of Congress and the presidency. Congress could have responded, but didn't.

At this time, democrats had 60 (!) seats in the senate, enough to end a filibuster, and they had to negotiate with MODERATE DEMOCRATS to pass the ACA. Moderate democrats are, on the face of things, the reason the ACA doesn't have a public option.

Don't get me wrong, I still vote democrat any chance I get, and would encourage everyone to do the same, but unfortunately I have to do it despite the fact they're bought and paid by the donor class, which are, by and large, fascists.

Democrats should started Jan 7th by screaming for Trump's arrest and not stopping until he was rotting in jail, but all we got was 4 years of nothing, followed by "too bad, so sad, we did everything we could".

by ses1984

2/6/2026 at 5:51:45 AM

This is one of those times where technically correct isn’t the best kind of correct.

Ok yeah fine there are fascists in both parties. Now that we have that out of the way where are we? Oh, right. The same fucking place. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soft apologetics.

We have a system that moves slowly at a national level by design. One party is hellbent on tearing that down in favor of literal (techno-)fascism. The other wants to maintain the incremental refinement of our democracy. That’s it. One party is literally promising Nazi Germany while the other is offering the potential of the United States of America.

So sure, when someone mentions Alex Preti’s murder or the literal Gestapo or the Epstein Files or unprecedented corruption or the irreparable harm to our international standing or the economic ruin that will take generations to heal or any of the other atrocities just tell them that Anthony Weiner was a creep. You won’t be wrong!

by mulmen

2/6/2026 at 7:22:36 AM

Did you make it all the way to the end of my post...?

I promise I am just as mad as you are about everything republicans are doing right now.

The problem is that when one party is hellbent on literal fascism, the opposition needs to be a little bit stronger than incremental refinement.

by ses1984

2/6/2026 at 7:31:10 AM

We don’t need incremental refinement now because we are facing an existential threat. The long term promise is a stable democracy. That’s the whole experiment.

We need to hold our noses on the Democrats’ historical performance because the whole party needs to be rebuilt. Instead of fixating on past failures focus on the progressive voices that grow every day.

by mulmen

2/6/2026 at 1:29:04 AM

No more relevant today than it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago tbh

by buzzerbetrayed

2/6/2026 at 8:41:51 AM

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.

by JuniperMesos

2/6/2026 at 4:55:19 AM

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.

by virgildotcodes

2/6/2026 at 9:16:37 AM

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.

by GJim

2/6/2026 at 11:01:53 AM

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

by throwaway290

2/6/2026 at 3:16:08 AM

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.

by Animats

2/6/2026 at 6:55:25 AM

Room 101 is the conference room where he sat through tedious meetings while working for the BBC.

by int0x29

2/5/2026 at 10:14:13 PM

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.

by ninalanyon

2/5/2026 at 10:54:30 PM

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.

by tenthirtyam

2/6/2026 at 1:46:00 AM

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.

by krapp

2/6/2026 at 1:59:02 AM

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.

by JuniperMesos

2/6/2026 at 5:22:34 AM

> 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.

by andsoitis

2/6/2026 at 8:55:20 AM

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.

by JuniperMesos

2/6/2026 at 1:56:31 PM

> Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math explainer YouTube channel

Looks like a great recommendation; hadn't come across it before. Thanks!

by andsoitis

2/6/2026 at 2:52:53 PM

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)

by a_better_world

2/6/2026 at 9:25:13 AM

> 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.

by GJim

2/6/2026 at 9:59:13 AM

> 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.

by graemep

2/6/2026 at 10:27:03 AM

I really don't know how to respond to such a naive interpretation of what I have written.

by GJim

2/6/2026 at 3:16:52 AM

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.

by janwillemb

2/6/2026 at 2:20:45 PM

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

by f4c39012

2/6/2026 at 6:57:53 AM

That’s just gate keeping. How hard does science fiction have to be in order to be considered worthwhile? Why does it matter?

by kergonath

2/6/2026 at 2:23:25 PM

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).

by whizzter

2/6/2026 at 5:43:35 PM

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.

by ahartmetz

2/6/2026 at 8:23:24 PM

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.

by saint_fiasco

2/6/2026 at 12:00:38 AM

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.

by rawgabbit

2/5/2026 at 9:54:28 PM

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)

by tomhow

2/5/2026 at 10:27:43 PM

Thank you for that. I agree with mannykannot, miesman, and Wildgoose. Asimov let his own left-friendly tendencies miss the forest for the trees.

by TMWNN

2/6/2026 at 12:08:15 AM

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.

by nl

2/6/2026 at 12:54:03 AM

"Animal Farm" is a satire of the Russian Revolution.

by hvs

2/6/2026 at 2:48:55 AM

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.

by TMWNN

2/6/2026 at 4:15:32 AM

> 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.

by nl

2/6/2026 at 10:13:24 AM

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.)

by jibal

2/6/2026 at 11:03:49 AM

Huh - yes you are right. I don't know what I was thinking, but it was very wrong.

by nl

2/6/2026 at 10:25:45 AM

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.

by pmontra

2/6/2026 at 5:41:11 AM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Asimov a republican?

by gostsamo

2/6/2026 at 10:25:57 AM

As in, in the modern American sense? No; I’m baffled as to what would make you think that.

by rsynnott

2/6/2026 at 8:51:47 AM

No. All his life he had the politics of his Brooklyn Jewish background; that is, left-leaning.

by TMWNN

2/6/2026 at 2:05:31 AM

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.

by elephanlemon

2/6/2026 at 3:00:59 AM

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

by sdwr

2/6/2026 at 2:26:34 AM

>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.

by melagonster

2/6/2026 at 3:48:04 AM

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.

by harry8

2/6/2026 at 11:19:48 AM

Try "The End of Eternity" to see how Asimov dealt with female characters when they were there...

by int_19h

2/6/2026 at 6:51:03 AM

You can't just stop with the first book. Keep reading...

by globular-toast

2/6/2026 at 8:42:53 AM

Or don't. There's so much more better SF out there.

by gerikson

2/6/2026 at 9:24:01 AM

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.

by globular-toast

2/6/2026 at 11:16:13 AM

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.

by willis936

2/6/2026 at 11:53:45 AM

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.

by globular-toast

2/6/2026 at 11:55:52 AM

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.

by willis936

2/6/2026 at 6:21:54 PM

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.

by expedition32

2/6/2026 at 1:36:24 PM

> 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.

by globular-toast

2/6/2026 at 2:42:35 PM

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.

by willis936

2/6/2026 at 10:51:03 AM

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.

by gerikson

2/6/2026 at 11:50:11 AM

Feel free to make more recommendations. I record every single one I get and usually read them eventually.

by globular-toast

2/6/2026 at 3:28:07 AM

[flagged]

by jamescrowley

2/6/2026 at 9:29:21 AM

What is the point you are tyring to make?

by GJim

2/5/2026 at 10:30:44 PM

After reading Asimov's review, I think the book has aged much better to be honest.

by elteto

2/6/2026 at 12:22:30 AM

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.

by bananaflag

2/7/2026 at 8:40:48 AM

Very interesting and so actual. Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite writers.

by alex_be

2/5/2026 at 11:15:47 PM

>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.

by Amorymeltzer

2/6/2026 at 12:22:07 AM

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.

by kevin_thibedeau

2/5/2026 at 11:22:28 PM

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.

by epistasis

2/6/2026 at 12:23:47 AM

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?

by tokai

2/6/2026 at 12:08:33 AM

Or the wealth could accumulate in the hands of a few

by just-the-wrk

2/6/2026 at 7:51:45 AM

> 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/

by kleiba

2/6/2026 at 8:20:33 AM

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.

by fake-name

2/6/2026 at 9:04:10 AM

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.

by thombat

2/6/2026 at 12:36:00 PM

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.

by cornholio

2/6/2026 at 2:15:35 PM

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.

by thombat

2/6/2026 at 11:30:20 AM

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.

by MomsAVoxell

2/6/2026 at 9:46:12 AM

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.

by Twisell

2/5/2026 at 10:24:11 PM

>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.

by TMWNN

2/5/2026 at 10:55:43 PM

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.

by pavlov

2/6/2026 at 10:57:07 AM

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.

by fransje26

2/6/2026 at 12:03:12 PM

In hindsight East Germany took a lot of inspiration from Nazi Germany.

by TitaRusell

2/5/2026 at 11:02:15 PM

> 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.

by TMWNN

2/6/2026 at 12:13:04 AM

North Korea is rather exceptional though. Few dictatorships manage even one smooth succession, let alone two.

by decimalenough

2/6/2026 at 1:33:21 AM

Monarchies

by neilellis

2/6/2026 at 2:13:28 AM

It depends on one's definition of dictatorship. I personally do not believe, for instance, the British Crown is one such instance.

by chungy

2/6/2026 at 3:04:56 AM

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.

by j-bos

2/6/2026 at 10:33:38 AM

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.

by pmontra

2/6/2026 at 2:58:20 PM

> or there would have been civil wars

Would have been? There were.

by ninalanyon

2/6/2026 at 6:02:07 AM

A lot of monarchies aren't really stable across two or more successions either.

by ses1984

2/6/2026 at 10:03:17 AM

Asimov comes off as incredibly naive.

by internet_points

2/6/2026 at 8:36:09 AM

> 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.

by rpigab

2/5/2026 at 11:20:12 PM

This also happened heavily under the Romanian communist regime. My parents were first hand witness to that.

by calini

2/6/2026 at 6:23:57 PM

” 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.”

by lijf

2/6/2026 at 6:50:33 AM

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.

by BoredGuyAtWork

2/6/2026 at 10:51:10 PM

The editing of the dictionary in that book is more troublesome than the surveillance state and propaganda campaigns.

by sillywabbit

2/6/2026 at 10:16:16 AM

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.

by zelos

2/6/2026 at 7:41:26 AM

> 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?

by kleiba

2/6/2026 at 2:59:18 PM

> Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand.

... but the latter may greatly benefit from the former

by kavalg

2/5/2026 at 11:19:01 PM

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.

by kergonath

2/6/2026 at 12:49:04 AM

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.

by slidehero

2/6/2026 at 7:05:12 AM

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.

by tehnub

2/6/2026 at 2:17:18 AM

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.

by sifar

2/6/2026 at 8:39:12 AM

Well that was fun to read Asimov critiquing a book so harshly

by qwertytyyuu

2/6/2026 at 6:55:50 PM

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.

by banku_brougham

2/5/2026 at 10:02:24 PM

"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

by bitwize

2/5/2026 at 10:56:28 PM

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.

by drivers99

2/6/2026 at 6:34:54 PM

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...)

by genewitch

2/5/2026 at 11:42:44 PM

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.

by bitwize

2/6/2026 at 4:33:37 AM

> 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.

by shmerl

2/5/2026 at 11:55:56 PM

[flagged]

by dominodave01

2/6/2026 at 3:56:41 AM

[flagged]

by fortran77

2/6/2026 at 10:12:01 AM

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.

by internet_points

2/6/2026 at 7:06:23 AM

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.

by kergonath

2/6/2026 at 10:04:15 PM

What propaganda? What are you talking about?

by rexpop

2/7/2026 at 5:19:43 AM

He's talking (nonsensically) about New Yorkers voting for Mamdani.

by jibal

2/6/2026 at 10:30:45 AM

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.

by jibal