> In the entirety of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, I haven't noticed a single car or truck in the streets of Oceania. Sure, Winston takes the train once

> In the entirety of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, I haven't noticed a single car or truck in the streets of Oceania. Sure, Winston takes the train once or twice, but no cars? I would have thought the generally envisioned future of the 40's included car-ridden roads. Was this novel even more ahead of its time than I thought? I think O'Brien says every member of the inner party has either a car or a helicopter. It's also stated that Oceania has a deliberate policy of discouraging technological advancement, except in the fields of military arms and mind control. The "generally envisioned future[s] of the 40's," were optimistic, 1984 is an extremely pessimistic dystopia. Once down to deliberately engineer grinding poverty for its population.