Un essai sur 1984 d'Orwell

[jerome]

A lire, un essai sur 1984 de George Orwell.

C'est en anglais et c'est ici.


Extrait : "
(...)
The book I'm referring to of course (obviously! the cover of it is at the top of this blog!) is 1984, by George Orwell. And it's a work of fiction that has become a byword for political and sociological prescience. So much of what Orwell imagined in 1984 has come true in our own world. And the fact that 'Big Brother' himself has become the inspiration for a television reality show can be regarded as either witty post-modernism on the part of the programme-makers, or a chilling validation of Orwell's dystopian vision, depending on personal taste.

I've always regarded Orwell's novel as a template and benchmark for what can be achieved in the science fiction genre. It's magnificently written, it's emotionally profound, it's sensual and sexual, it's intellectual, it's terrifying. I used to love reading the old pulp SF stories about green aliens and Lensmen and Barsoom and Null-A and the like; but 1984 shows that a science fiction novel can also be great literature.

The status of 1984 as an SF icon has been an article of faith for me for many years; so it came as a major shock when I discovered a while back that some people don't think this book is science fiction at all. And these are of course the same people who don't think The Hand Maid's Tale is science fiction, or don't accept that His Dark Materials is one of the great masterpieces of the Fantasy Genre.

There are, in fairness, some plausible reasons for supposing that 1984 is not in fact science fiction. The reasons are twofold; Orwell himself almost certainly didn't think it was science fiction, and many of his literary admirers also don't think it belongs to that genre. So shouldn't these opinions be heeded? Isn't it for the author of the book, and the fans of the book, to decide the genre of the book?

I am going to argue otherwise; sorry, George, like it or not, what you wrote is sci-fi. "