Definitely my favorite of the unofficial dystopian saga, and too much really because it's standing on the shoulders of its predecessors either. I think it just does the best job at 1) being propaganda, 2) telling a compelling and evocative narrative with the mask off. I think the thing that makes 1984 successful is also it's greatest downfall as a piece of propaganda. Too many specifics make it easy dismantle & poke holes in. Whereas things that were markedly different or divorced from reality, like BNW's eugenics, made it more difficult to be like 'well that would never happen' in response ot the other dystopias.

A common thread throughout the whole saa is the commoditization of sex, and the emphasis on the correlation between being stripped of sexual agency and human dignity.

Something I don't care for across all three, and especially 1984 is that they try to do too much as propaganda, when honest to God history books are right there. Like, on the one hand, I suppose it makes the subject of totalitarianism more accessible, but also it's not that hard, and this is like 1-step removed from just reading Solzhenitsyn. Similar criticism that I had with Book of Longings though in the sense that it seems unnecessary to fictionize and dramatize something that's so prevalent and readily available (as the authors would have you think), without adding anything to the plot that's exclusive to your fictional setting to justify its selection over, y'know, some Volgan hamlet circa 1955.

Whereas BNW was hinged on the eugenics-view of a totalitarian state, and We is just the Soviet Union before World War II, 1984 is more of a historical fiction exploring "would've happened if the Soviets won." Accordingly, the back third of the book is just torture.

Rigid enforcement of rules regarding sexual relations has led to some kinky freakiness in both of their preferences, where in the sexual impurity were deciduous of each partner is somehow more hedonically attractive than if they both remain virgin.

Sexual privation induces hysteria

In one of the history books that Winston is working on, he reads a passage that says 'the wars are purposeless because all of the three powers have their own internal economies that are self-sustainent. There's no need to war over markets, which was the cause for all previous wars.' I don't think that this makes sense for Orwell to say, as he's describing the revisionist history of a caricature of the Soviet Union, who would not have thought that prevalence of markets had anything to do with previous wars. Now, maybe I'm losing sight of the plot here and that this doesn't really matter, but I don't think that the kind of totalitarian power that he's describing would attribute existence of all wars to the effectiveness of freemarket capitalism, nor admit it.

another eyebrow raiser is Orwell's assertion by way of the black book that Hereditary oligarchy's have always been short-lived. That's just not true. I mean for some definition of short-lived sure, but there have been dynasties that have span comparable durations of time as for example of the Catholic Church, which is the positive example provided by Orwell. The threshold for short-lived is anything above the order of hundreds to thousands of years. Zhou Dynasty get fucked, JorJor.

to die hating them is freedom, to have a hole blown in your head before your heretical thought can go punished and corrected

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