2
mentions
mentions
I went into this book with great expectations since I've heard many references to it, but then found myself slightly disappointed with a thin plot and long sections that read like romance and then horror. Once I got past my initial reaction I realized that I've quite enjoyed the book in retrospect. It reads as a cautionary essay wrapped with a thin plot, attempting to sourly extrapolate societies built on communism/socialism. An interesting point was made that technology helps drive the enforceability of such regimes, which we should clearly be very mindful of. I also liked the idea that language ("Newspeak") shapes thoughts, which is of course quite convenient since language can be simply designed with specific thoughts in mind and then enforced. This makes it possible to manipulate people's thoughts, in case you thought that your own mind is the only definite place of sanctity. Lastly, I enjoyed the completeness and consistency with which the world was developed, even in the presence of on-a-surface insane elements such as "doublethink", or the insistence that 2+2=5, if the party says so. These sound insane, until by the end of the book when you're suddenly not so sure. As a closing remark I thought the book paints a picture that is slightly too much of a caricature. It's relatively easy to consider the party as clearly evil, or that everyone in its plot is basically insane. A more effective approach would present a more nuanced world that looks mostly right and believable, but is still rotten at its foundation with a more subtle form of evil - not black or white but a shade of gray. This would make it easier to draw parallels to a world we live in today, which already unfortunately contains some elements of this book, but is in many other ways of course quite significantly less bleak (phew!). 4/5 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
2015-09-06 on goodreads.com
A bit too much of a caricature but very enjoyable. A little too real. Newspeak.
— Andrej Karpathy