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I thought this was a very good article.
- Androids and China Mountain Zhang are both much less well-known than 1984—in part, I think, because they're both more nuanced. Orwell's dystopia doesn't acknowledges the existence of race or religion as vectors of oppression, and hardly touches on class except to suggest that the proles experience less surveillance than do Party members. In many ways, the horror of 1984 is not so much the vision of total oppression as it is the vision of total oppression visited on “normal” white English people. Orwell's novel is often thought of as an extrapolation from Stalin and Hitler, but Orwell's most direct experience of tyranny was as the oppressor in Britain's Indian colonial administration. In that sense, 1984 is in the tradition of War of the Worlds or John Christopher's Tripod series, in which aliens invade earth and treat the English just the way they've treated the people in their colonies.
creepyinfant · 3923 days ago · link ·
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