
It needs more public-spirited pigs: TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm - samclemens
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/26/ts-eliot-rejection-george-orwell-animal-farm-british-library-online
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RodericDay
related: Isaac Asimov's scathing review of 1984

 _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._

 _Nor was Orwell particularly prescient in the strictly social aspects of the
future he was presenting, with the result that the Orwellian world of 1984 is
incredibly old-fashioned when compared with the real world of the 1980s._

 _Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin
hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is
his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco._

 _He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one
expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely
one would expect him to invent some differences._

 _In his despair (or anger), Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have. All
his characters are, in one way or another, weak or sadistic, or sleazy, or
stupid, or repellent. This may be how most people are, or how Orwell wants to
indicate they will all be under tyranny, but it seems to me that under even
the worst tyrannies, so far, there have been brave men and women who have
withstood the tyrants to the death and whose personal histories are luminous
flames in the surrounding darkness. If only because there is no hint of this
in 1984, it does not resemble the real world of the 1980s._

 _Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening of
the feminine stereotype of 1949. There are only two female characters of
importance. One is a strong, brainless 'prole' woman who is an endless
washerwoman, endlessly singing a popular song with words of the type familiar
in the 1930s and 1940s (at which Orwell shudders fastidiously as 'trashy', in
blissful non-anticipation of hard rock)._

 _The other is the heroine, Julia, who is sexually promiscuous (but is at
least driven to courage by her interest in sex) and is otherwise brainless.
When the hero, Winston, reads to her the book within a book that explains the
nature of the Orwellian world, she responds by falling asleep - but then since
the treatise Winston reads is stupefyingly soporific, this may be an
indication of Julia 's good sense rather than the reverse._

 _In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad
science fiction._

[http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm](http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm)

~~~
Animats
Orwell's "1984" is a barely disguised description of Orwell's WWII job at the
British Ministry of Information. See "Orwell, the Lost Writings", which has
letters from his time there.[1]

Orwell's job during WWII was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English,
with a 1000 word vocabulary[2], for broadcast to the colonies, including
India. The British had a scheme at the time to get everyone in the colonies to
speak at least Basic English, and this was part of it.

Orwell observed that translation into Basic English is a political act. Some
concepts are very difficult to express in Basic English. Political ambiguity
does not translate at all.

Hence Newspeak.

As for "part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description
of the low quality of the gin and tobacco," that comes from the Ministry of
Information's canteen, described by other ex-employees as "dismal".

"Big Brother" seems to have been a senior staffer at the Ministry of
Information, who was actually called that (not to his face) by staff.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Orwell-Lost-Writings-
George/dp/0877957...](http://www.amazon.com/Orwell-Lost-Writings-
George/dp/0877957452) [2] [https://xkcd.com/1133/](https://xkcd.com/1133/)

~~~
arethuza
And Room 101 was a meeting room at the BBC:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3267261.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3267261.stm)

