Replying to the article's illustration here... 1984 was not the instruction manual. It mostly deals with the ongoing operations and consequences of the police

Replying to the article's illustration here... 1984 was not the instruction manual. It mostly deals with the ongoing operations and consequences of the police state and its surveillance. _That Hideous Strength_, its spiritual prequel (written by C. S. Lewis and published shortly before the atomic bomb, later reviewed and then ripped off by Orwell) is the instruction manual. :) (In Orwell's defense, he did make improvements. The problem with a Lewis book, as Orwell observed, is that God exists and you know that the good guys win at the end, so the dystopian police state isn't scary enough... which is the major difference between the two in the plots.)