{"id":707,"date":"2025-06-22T15:32:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T12:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/?p=707"},"modified":"2025-06-23T08:01:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T05:01:43","slug":"707","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/?p=707","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I've just finished reading 1984. I loved it. It was terrifying. I've read several horror stories, but none of them was as horrifying as 1984. It's not merely a tale about totalitarianism. It's a model of a universe. Like The Dark Forest. You read it and wonder, can this be our own universe? Can it be possible? Can it be inevitable? Or were some fundamental laws of nature altered for it to be like that? It is delirious. It takes something, like power, violence, or submission, distills it to the purest, brings it to the extreme, propagates it through the backdoors of the creation.

Even if you haven't read the story, you must already know how it was culturally significant and prophetic. And it was quite popular, so I naturally thought it was a boring piece of work for the boring masses, a story in which the people rise up against tyranny, and then everyone cheers and you watch the fireworks. And maybe there's a bittersweet finale, in which the protagonist bleeds out but smiles faintly. I thought it was a pseudo-documentary, a historical novel set in the future. But it's nothing like that. It is a gruesome science fiction.

I didn't immediately grasp its true nature. As I was reading it, there were some parts that felt too naive, exaggerated, or unrealistic. Only when I was approaching the book's final chapters, it all started to feel appropriate. Or take this little quote, for example:

\"Throughout recorded time, [...] there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. [...] The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low [...] is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.\"

It appears in the second half of the book. It makes your eyebrows rise. You see this old trope where \"rich and powerful = bad, poor and powerless = good,\" this apparent candy to the average reader; you half-expect some sort of a postponed glorious revolution (or at least an attempt of one) led by the virtuous proletariat. But at this point you *still* don't understand what this book is about. But by the end of it, even this quote starts to make sense.

Read 1984 if you want something dark.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve just finished reading 1984. I loved it. It was terrifying. I’ve read several horror stories, but none of them was as horrifying as 1984. It’s not merely a tale about totalitarianism. It’s a model of a universe. Like The Dark Forest. You read it and wonder, can this be our own universe? Can it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":715,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions\/715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}