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I Just Finished Rereading 1984


Razors Edge

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1 hour ago, Razors Edge said:

...and this time through, I was rooting for the Big Brother team. Strange.  I sort of became very irritated by the "resistance" characters.  Maybe Brits are just not too good at bucking the system.

So you preferred " perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

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3 minutes ago, late said:

Yep.  The proles were useless (and didn't actually play much of a part in the book), and the protagonist and his lady friend weren't too inspiring.  The bad guys had more "interesting" stuff going on. Sometimes, the villains steal the show and you cheer for the baddies rather than the goodies.

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24 minutes ago, Kzoo said:

I remember starting to read that back in the very early 70's.  I don't remember getting very far into it and I don't remember why I never picked it back up. 

It's not a long book. You could try again - older and wiser.

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1 hour ago, Parr8hed said:

I have listened to it before.  Honestly I think it's one of VH's best albums, right after Women and Children First. 

My library just added this to the new vinyl collection. I'll have to check it out. I haven't listened to it in years. I saw VH back in the day. I think it was the Diver Down tour. 

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1 hour ago, Razors Edge said:

Yep.  The proles were useless (and didn't actually play much of a part in the book), and the protagonist and his lady friend weren't too inspiring.  The bad guys had more "interesting" stuff going on. Sometimes, the villains steal the show and you cheer for the baddies rather than the goodies.

Odd choice..

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24 minutes ago, Page Turner said:

...have you tried recently ?  

My parents lived through WW2. My Mom tried to hide her fear, but she was terrified of the Germans. At the beginning of the war, we got the crap kicked out of us.

In 73, I visited franco's Spain, and Russian occupied Hungary. That gave me an appreciation of how much totalitarian governments sucked.

Hell on Earth.

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1 hour ago, Couch_Incident said:

You should try to get laid, Page.  Sex is good. 

Couch 

...sex is best for young, beautiful people. As a young, beautiful person, you should pursue it with great vigor, as did I when i was young and beautiful.  Now, I have the pursuit of enlightenment.  There are some paths to enlightenment that involve sex, but I am not on one of those.  It's still enlightenment.  It's like driving across the country and staying on US 50. :)   You still end up in the same place, but there are fewer people on the road you're using.

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33 minutes ago, Page Turner said:

...sex is best for young, beautiful people. As a young, beautiful person, you should pursue it with great vigor, as did I when i was young and beautiful.  Now, I have the pursuit of enlightenment.  There are some paths to enlightenment that involve sex, but I am not on one of those.  It's still enlightenment.  It's like driving across the country and staying on US 50. :)   You still end up in the same place, but there are fewer people on the road you're using.

Man, you must be really high at the moment.

Couch

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9 hours ago, Razors Edge said:

...and this time through, I was rooting for the Big Brother team. Strange.  I sort of became very irritated by the "resistance" characters.  Maybe Brits are just not too good at bucking the system.

If you want to read some neat what-if stuff, read some Stanislaw Lem scifi.  Some of it is a veiled attack on the communist system that existed in Poland while he was writing. Some of it predicts things like smartphones and Internet-like information retrieval.  Some of it is highly humorous like Star Diaries,  where a space pilot alone on a starship travels a star cluster where strange time distortions occurred so he could meet an earlier version of himself because he needed two people to fix the "rudder."

Eventually, the ship gets filled with so many versions of himself and when more than one of them agrees they have to fix the rudder, an argument rages as to who gets to do it. So they create a government, write a constitution, etc. - and the political idiocy begins.

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Yea, 1984 was a well-written dystopia. I was reading/studying that book, around the same time Communist China was hitting back/jailing innocent freedom fighters.  Then a few years later was the Tianamen Square massacre of non-violent student protesters in Beijing.

I do recall as an older teenager, picking up letters from relatives in mainland China.  The seal of envelope looked as if it had been opened before it reached us in Canada.

I have no idea why but I think also of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" ….and I haven't even read the book yet.  I just saw chunks of the movie while on the plane.  A patriarchal, totalitarian  dystopia...which sadly does still exist in some parts of the world.  I think that's why I don't want to read the book:  gloomy thoughts.  One thinks of Saudi Arabia.  Dystopia for women, even for those living in (air-conditioned) luxury.  I would never want to live there.

 

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1 hour ago, shootingstar said:

Yea, 1984 was a well-written dystopia. I was reading/studying that book, around the same time Communist China was hitting back/jailing innocent freedom fighters.  Then a few years later was the Tianamen Square massacre of non-violent student protesters in Beijing.

I do recall as an older teenager, picking up letters from relatives in mainland China.  The seal of envelope looked as if it had been opened before it reached us in Canada.

I have no idea why but I think also of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" ….and I haven't even read the book yet.  I just saw chunks of the movie while on the plane.  A patriarchal, totalitarian  dystopia...which sadly does still exist in some parts of the world.  I think that's why I don't want to read the book:  gloomy thoughts.  One thinks of Saudi Arabia.  Dystopia for women, even for those living in (air-conditioned) luxury.  I would never want to live there.

 

I read the Handmaid's Tale, didn't like it. Partly because, if you read scifi, you'd have seen literally a hundred dystopian novels before.

So you wouldn't have the same reaction. Personally, I've gone off dystopia. My 2 fave scifi are the Commonwealth Saga, and The Expanse. I love them both.

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On 2/22/2019 at 3:01 PM, late said:

Hell on earth, just to start with..

That doesn't make the book any better.  Dystopias are pretty much always hell on Earth, and while some of the lies = truth stuff is pretty apropos these days, the rest of the story didn't do it for me :(

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21 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

You may want to reread it.  It's so far from any "reality", that I'm guessing you are just remembering some of the broad points.

I started it a few months ago, didn't finish the first chapter. But the 'broad points' are becoming everyday

I don't know if I've become jaded, or discriminating, or just old, but I have a hard time maintaining interest in most books or movies anymore. As a kid I would get a book and read it, probably more than once, whether I liked it or not, just to see what happened next. I seem to have lost that curiosity.  

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