Orwell's work beside 1984 is better (in the sense of more complex/relevant to our time, not as entertaining.) In particular, his writing on the Spanish Civil Wa

Orwell's work beside 1984 is better (in the sense of more complex/relevant to our time, not as entertaining.) In particular, his writing on the Spanish Civil War has seemed relevant today: "I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys." 1984 is largely about the surveillance state and oppression, with a bit at the end about Orwell's views on truth; for those who say 1984 was a worse predictor of the future than Fahrenheit 451, I say the idea of the destruction of truth was more important than the methods anyway. http://orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1 http://orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1