I think both fit very well within the trope that Leo Marx when talking about American literature called the Machine in the Garden[1] myth. It's a sort of story

I think both fit very well within the trope that Leo Marx when talking about American literature called the Machine in the Garden[1] myth. It's a sort of story in which authors long for pastoral, naturalistic settings that are small scale and untouched by machinery, and so forth. This is both found in Orwell's democratic Socialism as well as in Tokien's idealized Christian community that is Hobbingen. Orwell of course literally attacks Stalinism and I always interpreted Tolkien's work as doing the same thing, not entirely sure how else to interpret Saruman industrializing the Shire, even though he of course always denied these parallels. Personally I never really could stand this kind of literature for a lot of the reasons Asimov talks about in his review of 1984[2]. It's parochial, technophobic, stereotypically English with its snobbish attitude towards literature, ink quills, pipes and so on and paranoid about anything that seems like popular mass culture or too large or organized in scal or in any other way related to modernity. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden [2]http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm