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I was reluctant. I remembered almost nothing of the book and said so - but Denison Demac, the lovely young woman who is my contact at FNS, simply sent me a copy of it and said, 'Read it.'
Real beta behaviour from Asimov here smh.
I felt I would have to write the critique if only to set people straight. (I'm sorry; I love setting people straight.)
True poster energy. :rat-salute:
He wasn't much affected, apparently, by the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, for there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.
LOL
Orwell not only foresaw the communist victory (he saw that victory everywhere, in fact) but also foresaw that Russia and China would not form a monolithic bloc but would be deadly enemies. There, his own experience as a Leftist sectarian may have helped him. He had no Rightist superstitions concerning Leftists as unified and indistinguishable villains. He knew they would fight each other as fiercely over the most trifling points of doctrine as would the most pious of Christians.
I’m falling in love with Asimov holy shit. Are his books anywhere near as good?
To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s. The world may go communist, if not by 1984, then by some not very much later date; or it may see civilisation destroyed. If this happens, however, it will happen in a fashion quite different from that depicted in 1984 and if we try to prevent either eventuality by imagining that 1984 is accurate, then we will be defending ourselves against assaults from the wrong direction and we will lose.
Asimov says socialism or barbarism.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.
Eric Blair was a racist monarchist and a snitch
In this book, George Orwell expresses aristocratic contempt towards the people, the working class. The main target of critique in this book is not the revolutionaries, but the working classes themselves. They are depicted as dumb, incompetent, incapable of reasoning, without any historical initiative — a manipulable mass lacking any capacity for political protagonism.
From what is objectively the best Animal Farm review.
A basket of deplorables, you might say?
Yes that's still common today.
I've been working my way through the Foundation series and I'm enjoying it enough to have made it to the last book. Weak female characters, but in a Tolkien way rather than a Niven way
Tolkien has few female characters but the ones that are there in the greater mythology are some of the coolest and most developed . Yvanna, Varda, Lothian, Galadriel and Eowyn are all top tier. I get what you mean with Asimov tho
asimov's short stories are outstanding, will really make you think about some stuff for forever. I'm still left thinking about some of the twists years later. the Foundation trilogy is so good at historical materialism you'd be shocked a lib wrote it. I need to read the gods themselves as an adult rather than a super horny teenager to tell you if it was any good or not. Like others have said, sometimes his women are kinda weak, but show up pretty frequently compared to some science fiction writers and actually do things in the stories. he also improved on this as he matured.
Are his books anywhere near as good?
His short stories are all thought experiments for their own sake, presented as compelling, but nerdy, mysteries.
I should get around to reading Foundation some day.
in one of his short stories AI supercomputers create a perfect centrally planned economy through their function to maximize economic efficiency and basically do a communism and nobody even realizes it because their material conditions get exponentially better
i love the optimistic outlook so much more than every redditorbro techie's takes, but this seems kinda naive given how easy it would be to just create an ai that's primary goal is "maximizing profit" and then ending human life indirectly by creating a living being that can only feel pleasure by obtaining money
that's where the age of his works shines through since his supercomputers were more hardware then software and had the immutable laws of robotics to govern them so it forced them to work around "do not harm x" which basically eliminated capitalism because of all the harming
