1984

A world where every human right has been violated and every notion of freedom and individuality is abolished. A world where Big Brother monitors everything through advanced technology devices. A world where the war against an invisible enemy never ends, thoughts go underground and any deviation from the dictates of the regime is punished relentlessly until it is "corrected". A world where those in power have the power to alter the past and deny the self-existence of reality, a world where language and its words change to keep up with the new
A verified dystopian vision in the form of a novel, 1984, one of those few works that have accurately defined their century, continues to warn us more than seventy years after its publication that totalitarianism, with all its mass of illusions, knows no measure or limit, nor does it belong definitively to the past.
The book was published just seven months before the author's death from tuberculosis in January 1950. Apart from the futuristic environment described (and which was twice adapted for the cinema, in 1956 and 1984, without great success on both occasions, despite Sir Richard Burton's participation in the latter), apart from its apt predictions about mass surveillance, the nature of authoritarian regimes and the levelling out of any notion of difference, what is even more striking are the neologisms that remain handy to this day: Terms such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "SexCrime" and the famous "Cold War" - which he himself coined a few years ago - are not only used daily, but are so apt that one wonders how a human mind could have conceived them a full seven decades ago.