Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

This is not one of Asimov's best works. While he is probably right about Orwell's feud with Stalinism, to judge 1984 by how well it predicts the future is beside the point, just as it would be a mistake to judge Asimov's own work by the accuracy of his imagining of future computer technology.

Asimov's dismissal of 'newspeak' as mostly just abbreviation completely overlooks the power of propaganda and fake news, or the Whorfian concept that underlies it. He complains that a human-operated surveillance state would not work, but this review was written before the opening of the Stasi files revealed how it does. Asimov's suggestion that Orwell should have posited automated surveillance does, of course, foreshadow what is becoming possible now, but he does not seem to do any better than Orwell in imagining such a future.

Orwell's renaming of Britain as 'Airstrip One' shows that, far from thinking of Oceania as the British Empire, he regards Britain as a satellite state of the USA, analogous to the cold war status of Eastern European states.

I had to chuckle at Asimov's complaints of sexism and racial bigotry in the novel, considering the prevalence of these things in his beloved 'golden age' science fiction, and for some time after.

> Asimov's dismissal of 'newspeak' as mostly just abbreviation completely overlooks the power of propaganda and fake news, or the Whorfian concept that underlies it.

But the strong Sapir-Whorf position of linguistic determinism in which the concept of newspeak is firmly grounded has generally been rejected and was never well supported; propaganda more generally is a different issue than newspeak specifically.

Agreed, and I don't regard the strong version as correct, either. What I mean here is that Orwell's concept of newspeak is Whorfian in nature, going beyond propaganda, and Asimov does not seem to appreciate either aspect of newspeak.

It's also entirely possible that even if Asimov had been introduced to the hypothesis at the time that he may have sided with Sapir and Whorf themselves who felt the Strong position was untenable for more than a thought experiment (ie, that it was a proper Null Hypothesis designed to be disproven, to prove more useful things such as some of the corollaries to the Weak version of the Hypothesis). Asimov would have probably loved that about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, given the implication that he and (John W.) Campbell built the Three Laws as a Null Hypothesis to disprove. [1] Makes you wonder if Campbell had taken a fancy to Sapir-Whorf as much as he did Psionics or Robotics what sorts of sci-fi might have mined that concept; an Asimov Sapir-Whorf novel might have been fascinating.

[1] I personally am on the side that the novels do manage to disprove the Three Laws several times, particularly in that the Zeroth Law is a huge consequent failure in the Laws (resulting directly in the failure of the Empire and a lot of the weirdness of the Foundation era), but it's a fascinating debate on both sides, and an interesting question of which side Asimov himself was on at various points in his career.

He did a amazing job of picking apart the novel but he missed the forest for the trees.

Indeed - to be honest, given Asimov's well known socialist sympathies I read it as a tiresome screed that deliberately misinterpreted Orwell's writing - part of the socialist sectarianism that Asimov himself alludes to but which he is clearly guilty of himself.

For example, it is well known that the concept of Newspeak actually originated as a dystopian version of Esperanto, not at all as just "abbreviations".

Furthermore "1984" never suggests that people are under constant surveillance, just that they never know when they are being watched.

And as for the idea of using computers for the surveillance, we are talking about a man who in his own SF stories, (written after 1948 which was when Orwell wrote "1984"), still had his scientists pulling out slide rules to do calculations.

Sorry, but this just reads as a deliberate hatchet job.

I concur - far from one of Asimov's best works.

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