Little known fact: 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain. Orwell was a propaganda correspondent for the BBC; his wife worked for the Censorship Department. 1984 was based on his experiences then, and the disillusionment of the Cold War immediately following WW2. He had initially intended to title it 1948.

Actually, this is not that little-known: it's in the Wikipedia page for George Orwell and easily accessible on the net, and the text itself says it's set in Great Britain after the major powers have divided up the world and entered a state of perpetual war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War...

http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwell...

People get thrown by the title, though, thinking that it's a prediction of a future dystopia while Orwell was actually writing about the world he lived in then.