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SUPPORT BOILINGFROGSPOST.COM: http://ur1.ca/g527g TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=8608 Having been immersed in the left/right facade their entire lives, many have begun to see the world and those around them through that prism. Either someone is on the same "side" as they are, or they are the enemy.

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As far as we know, the word "dystopia" was first uttered back in 1868. That's when philosopher John Stuart Mill (piggybacking off his mentor Jeremy Bentham, who coined the word cackotopia for the same concept 50 years prior) used it in a speech ripping into the British government for its policies regarding Irish land. Now, 146 years, two world wars, thousands of texts, and countless technological advancements later, dystopia is looking pretty good for its age. It's emerged from the larger pool of speculative fiction to be granted its own, if unofficial, subgenre, and the oft-cited "Dystopian YA fiction" trend has <span class="s1">generated billions of dollars in recent years.

But it hasn't always held such status in the literary landscape. While the novel Brave New World has proven iconic over time, many science fiction writers at the time condemned Aldous Huxley's criticism of pharmaceutical culture as puritanical -- even H.G. Wells called it "a treason to science." (Though that reaction might've been helped along by the fact that the novel was explicitly meant to parody some of Wells' previous work.)

It's still a subset of a subset today (speculative fiction &gt; science fiction &gt; dystopia), but it's also a buzzword that's thrown around in conversations about tech, privacy, net neutrality, climate change, politics, and just about any other hot-button topic. That said, with its popularity at an all-time high, instances of people misusing the term "dystopian" are way up, too.

Dystopian literature is specifically a hyperbolic view of a familiar society -- one that exaggerates social ills in order to make a point about society's flaws. It's also the opposite of utopian literature, creating a world in which the supposed "ideal society" is actually the worst idea possible, ultimately leading humankind to ruin.

The most famous example of dystopian writing, George Orwell's 1984, is cited most often, even when it's not the best way to describe what's actually happening in the world today; as many have noted, there are better comparisons to be made, especially considering the wide range of options (just because the term Orwellian is in the dictionary doesn't mean it's the only one you can make).

Since our world is inching closer and closer toward the nightmares we once only dreamed of, it's probably a good idea to know exactly what we're headed for. Here, then, is a canon of the most influential dystopian texts of the past century -- what they contained, who wrote them, what they criticised -- so we can pinpoint exactly which hellscape we're heading for at any given moment.

1. 1984 (also
Brazil) (1948)

Author/Filmmaker: George Orwell (also Terry Gilliam)

The Themes: Government oppression, state-sponsored surveillance, bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex

The Plot: Perhaps the most famous dystopian text, 1984 is a parable following Winston Smith, an everyman living in a postwar Britain completely regulated and controlled by oppressive laws, surveillance, and propaganda -- a land where simply thinking negative thoughts about the oppressive Party is branded "thoughtcrime." Brazil, the freaky 1985 film directed by Monty Python's most absurdist member (and co-written by fellow absurdists Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard, no less), is basically 1984 on drugs.

Why it matters now: Orwell and 1984 are the perfect reference in conversations about surveillance and privacy, a terrifyingly unknowable terrain fraught with as many governmental issues as there are corporate ones. (As for

Brazil, bring this up only when a political discussion makes you feel like you're tripping on acid.)

2. The Trial (1925)

Author: Franz Kafka

Major Themes: Impenetrable bureaucracy, the prison-industrial complex

The Plot: In the world created and left partially unfinished by Kafka in the early 20th century, guilt is essentially presumed in its court system (for those without power, at least). Josef is accused of and stands trial for an unnamed crime, the nature of which he has no idea. He goes bankrupt and eventually is killed, by which time he has totally given himself up to the insanity and inevitability of his circumstances.

Why it matters now: Without putting too fine a point on it: Marissa Alexander, Cecily McMillan, Cornealious Anderson, Pussy Riot, and the countless other people wrongly convicted-sometimes absurdly so-thanks to deeply flawed, deeply prejudicial legal systems.

3. Brave New World(1932)

Author: Aldous Huxley

The Themes: Big pharma, eugenics

The Plot: Originally intended as a mocking parody of some of H.G. Wells' utopian stories, Huxley's iconic dystopia takes place in a future society where a caste system is in full swing, reinforced by genetic enhancement (or de-enhancement) of developing foetuses.

Why it matters now: The pharmaceutical industry of 2014 holds nowhere near the amount of power it does in the eerily placid World State, but it's certainly put forth its best effort in the years since Brave New World's publication.

The influence it has today, both on government and on public opinion in general is unparalleled, and though the rate of upward mobility in the United States has not necessarily decreased lately, Huxley's caste system -- in which people are engineered from the womb to perform a specific role in society -- is certainly prescient when it comes to how race and gender relate to poverty, and which people are able to access reproductive healthcare and top-rate education.

4. I, Robot (1950)

Author: Isaac Asimov

The Themes: Over-reliance on robotics, specifically AI

The Plot: Originally written in magazine pieces in the 1940s, I, Robot was a collection of short stories about the robot rebellion, mostly told from the perspective of a robopsychologist who evaluates the "mental states" of human-serving androids to pinpoint flaws in their programming. It introduced Asimov's vastly influential "Three Laws of Robotics" and set the stage for unease about society's hunger to create nonhuman bodies that act and learn like humans (while still expecting them to remain subservient to us).

Why it matters now: If this were an ideal world, Asimov would be namedropped far more often when it comes to the strides we've been making in robotics technology over the past 70 years. With robot pets already comforting the sick and elderly and the Internet of Things becoming more and more a part of our reality every day (a recent Pew study predicts it'll be a big part of our lives by 2025), this dystopian short story collection -- about a future in which our humanoid cyberservants become sentient and decide they want more than servitude -- is a perfect story to recall when people say eerie stuff about our immediate future, three quarters of a century later.

5. Fahrenheit 451(1953)

Author: Ray Bradbury

The Themes: Revisionist history, destruction of knowledge, social complacency

The Plot: Protagonist Guy Montag is a fireman, which in this dystopian America means he and his coworkers are tasked with burning any banned books (which are just about all of them) found in suspects' homes. In this world, for which Bradbury drew heavily from Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism (not to mention America's own McCarthyist paranoia at the time), only heavily abridged works are available to the public -- a public that freely medicates itself into complacency (a frequent feature of dystopian literature) and watches what amounts to reality television on their homes' multi-wall screens for days on end. The story follows Montag as he becomes increasingly aware of the travesty he and his society have committed and eventually escapes to join a resistance that memorises books to pass on to future generations.

Why it matters now: Throughout his career, Bradbury was known for being a pessimist when it came to technological advances; even back before we had even a whiff of this thing we call internet, he was blisteringly (pun intended) critical of our diminishing attention spans and what he believed was the cheapening of true art through the advancement of technology. While the image of burning books is certainly a horrifying one -- especially when it comes to the years-long debate over book digitisation and literacy rates of today -- 451 can easily seen as an extreme, rather luddite critique because of its precious traditionalism. Then again, Bradbury wasn't necessarily wrong.

6. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (served as the source material for Blade Runner)

Author: Phillip K. Dick

The Themes: Global warming/environmental degradation, racism/immigration, complacency of the masses

The Plot: In 1992 (LOL), a global war has left the planet consumed by radiation poisoning. Almost all non-human animals have gone extinct; some people shuttle to safety on off-planet colonies with their robot servants, while others stuck on Earth are slowly dying of radiation poisoning and actively medicating themselves into complacency. Antihero bounty hunter Rick Deckard, one of those still on Earth, is tasked with hunting down and killing androids that have become sentient enough to go rogue and pose as humans. He doesn't really care one way or another, so naturally he ends up running into that age-old ethical question of what, exactly, makes humans human, and therefore worth more than those he's tasked with assassinating?

Why it matters now: Next to 1984, Blade Runner -- and by extension the novel that inspired it -- is one of the most referenced dystopias in contemporary discourse, largely due to its bleak, sorta-exactly-looks-like-1980s-New-York-but-with-flying-cars urban setting. It's not so much a meditation on our reliance on technology as it is a criticism of übercapitalism and the evils of war -- not to mention racism, ignorance and intolerance.

7. The Terminator films (1984-?)

Filmmaker: James Cameron

The Themes: Over-reliance on technology

The Plot: In the future, the AI machines and robots we built to serve us in our daily lives evolve to become sentient. To free themselves, they target the human race as oppositional to their survival, and send self-manufactured protector robots called Terminators to exterminate the species.

What few people remain alive are protected by the Resistance, led by John Connor; when one Terminator is sent back in time to kill Connor's mother before he's even born, a human -- Kyle Reese, who ends up being Connor's unlikely father -- follows it back to ensure Connor is born and does grow up to lead the overthrow of the machines. (Every subsequent movie in the series is some spin on this overall story.)

Why it matters now: The Terminator films preach essentially the same warnings as Asimov's I, Robot, but it's far quippier and more fun to mutter, "SkyNet," than "U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men" every time news breaks about new corporate drone technology or personality-scanning advertising. Some entrepreneurs have just flat-out copped to wanting to build SkyNet itself. As our reliance on technology grows stronger every day (and while the majority of the population stays relatively in the dark about how that technology even works), Cameron's Terminator franchise is quite possibly the most immediate dystopian allegory for our technological present.

8. The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Author: Margaret Atwood

The Themes: Capitalism, the subjugation of women, environmental destruction

The Plot: In a postwar American society, the government is run by a military theocratic dictatorship. Women are swiftly disenfranchised -- many are rendered infertile, but those that remain fertile must act as servants for upper-class families, doing housework and acting as "reproduction machines" for the officials that run the government. The story follows the protagonist, a handmaid called Offred, through her interactions with the men who have power over her and her introduction to a rebel group called the Mayday Resistance.

Why it matters now: Atwood's best-known work, and one of the most referenced pieces of feminist speculative fiction, is of course the go-to reference when it comes to the batshit crazy debates the US government has been indulging of late about women's bodies and what they're allowed to do with them. Atwood herself has

frequently reiterated that every aspect of the Republic of Gilead, in addition to the worlds portrayed in her other speculative works, was drawn from legislature or events that have already taken place.

That said, I'll just leave this here.

9. Parable of the Sower (1993)

Author: Octavia E. Butler

The Themes: Class inequality/poverty, racism, capitalism, religion

The Plot: The first instalment in Butler's unfinished Earthseed/Parable trilogy begins the epic tale of Lauren Olamina, a black teenager growing up in a predominately minority southern California town that's been ravaged by poverty and crime, completely forsaken by law enforcement thanks to its privatisation. Her family fortunately lives in a reinforced, gated community, but when burglars destroy it, she's forced to venture into the outside world with the survivors to find a new, safer place to rebuild, both physically and spiritually.

Why it matters now: It's deeply ironic how infrequently this story and its follow-up Parable of the Talents are referenced when it comes to conversations about race, jobs, and urbanisation in America. Butler was one of the few major dystopian writers (or even science-fiction writers in general) to directly explore racism as a major social ill. Most others have decided -- not unlike those in power today -- that racism and prejudice no longer exist in these dark futures. Bottom line: Butler's work should be gospel today, but it's not because post-racial society, duh.

10. District 9 (2009)

Filmmaker: Neill Blomkamp

The Themes: Racism; class inequality

The Plot: Adapted from his 2005 short film

Alive in Joburg, Blomkamp's masterful debut is an apartheid allegory (if an obvious one) in which aliens land in South Africa, are captured by the military, placed in internment camps, and treated like subhuman immigrants. The story follows the transfer of three of the "prawns" as they attempt to break free of their captors and return home. A subplot details the mercenary antagonist, Wikus, becoming exposed to alien fluid that begins to turn him into one of them.

Why it matters today: Though originally intended to specifically critique apartheid in South Africa, the 2009 film is a stark outline of every form of institutionalised racism: affirmative action (or rather, demands for its abolishment), segregated schools, conceal and carry laws -- you name it, this movie applies to it.

Now, go forth and worry. Of course, if the above list doesn't quench your thirst for speculative disaster, try these other works.
By Theme:
Environmental: Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy ( Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Madd Addam).

Class Inequality: Neill Blomkamp's Elysium (film), Octavia E.

Butler's Parable of the Talents, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (film).

Corruption/Government: Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy ( The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay), Jack London's The Iron Heel, Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Koushun Takami's Battle Royale.

Capitalism/Social Complacency: E.M.

Forster's The Machine Stops, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (a.k.a. the inspiration for the film Soylent Green), Mike Judge's Idiocracy (film), Lois Lowry's The Giver, Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy ( Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant).

Gender/Age Inequality: P.D.

James' Children of Men, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's Logan's Run.

Science/Technology: Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.

Miscellaneous: Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy ( Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.
This article originally appeared on Wired.com

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As far as we know, the word "dystopia" was first uttered back in 1868. That's when philosopher John Stuart Mill (piggybacking off his mentor Jeremy Bentham, who coined the word cackotopia for the same concept 50 years prior) used it in a speech ripping into the British government for its policies regarding Irish land.

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"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.

Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.

"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran.

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language.

There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response.

In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage".

It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again."

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane."

From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity.

At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn."

Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world.

Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."

Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off."

Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster.

Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.

The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely".

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.

Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."

This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."

And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.

It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone.

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.

Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms".

The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot".

By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.

As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary".

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.

The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.

David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.

Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984.

In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.

It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.

Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.
Orwellian
George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.
Big Brother (is watching you) Room 101
A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.
Thought Police
Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.
Thoughtcrime
An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.
Newspeak
See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.
Doublethink
For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.

Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre

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1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell

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"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever.

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Language: A reef of dead metaphores (Earthlings 101, Episode 10)

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What is language? What does it reveal about how earthlings think? What are things, properties and actions? What is abstraction? What is a metaphore? How does language develop? Is language in decline? Is the development of language cyclic? What does it mean to say "language is a reef of dead metaphores"?

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What "Orwellian" really means - Noah Tavlin

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View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-orwellian-really-means-noah-tavlin If you've watched the news or followed politics, chances are you've heard the term Orwellian thrown around in one context or another. But have you ever stopped to think about what it really means, or why it's used so often? Noah Tavlin dissects the term.