Few novels have earned the word "prophetic" as honestly as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the conversation between Tom from StoryHero and Aydin Ilhan made that case with unusual personal force. Aydin recalled devouring the book in a single day at sixteen, on a bus journey from his hometown to São Paulo, reading it in Portuguese — a translation that renders Orwell's concept of Doublethink as dupli-pensar and Animal Farm as A Revolução dos Bichos (The Animal Revolution). Tom came to Orwell from the opposite direction: an English teacher in what he described as the British fourth form screened the animated Animal Farm for a class of teenagers who arrived expecting a cartoon and left, by his account, scared and tearful. Both readers, it turned out, had arrived at 1984 already primed by personal and national history to feel its weight differently from a reader in a comfortable liberal democracy.
That weight became the session's gravitational centre. Tom noted that a prominent Burmese political prisoner — describing Orwell as a prophet — had said that what the novel depicted, Myanmar had lived. It was a striking framing: Orwell served as a colonial policeman in Burma, and the system he later anatomised in fiction took root, decades later, in the very country where he had once enforced imperial order. Aydin deepened this thread by drawing on his own academic research: his master's thesis examined the psychological impact of autocratic regimes on individuals, and he had interviewed people from Myanmar directly. The details they shared — property seized overnight, phones searched at military checkpoints, people who "disappeared" and either returned utterly changed or did not return at all — mapped onto Orwell's fictional architecture with an exactness that neither reader found comfortable. "We lost our freedom," one of Aydin's interview subjects had messaged him during the aftermath of the 2021 coup, the present tense making the novel's past tense feel suddenly inadequate. Aydin also spoke of growing up in Brazil under the long shadow of its military dictatorship, a regime he knew largely through his parents' stories but which he recognised, feature by feature, in Orwell's Oceania.
The discussion turned with particular intensity to two of Orwell's most unsettling inventions: Newspeak and the manipulation of the past. Aydin lingered on the logic of vocabulary reduction — the idea that shrinking language year by year, embedding the diminished lexicon in schools, would progressively narrow the cognitive space in which dissent could even be formulated. From there, the conversation moved naturally to technology and to what Aydin called the convergence between 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: where Orwell imagined the dictatorship of political ideology, Huxley imagined the dictatorship of science and pleasure, and Aydin argued that both vectors are now visibly at work simultaneously. The voluntary surrender of private life to social media platforms, the outsourcing of thought to AI, a measurable generational decline in IQ scores — these, he suggested, are the unforeseen externalities of technologies built for connectivity and convenience. Tom noted that on the very morning of their discussion, the U.S. Congress had approved expanded domestic surveillance, a detail that needed no editorial gloss.
The emotional peak of the session came when Aydin described the scene in Room 101 — Winston Smith's face held inches from a cage of starving rats, his deepest fear weaponised to finally strip him of selfhood. "They managed to identify his biggest fear," Aydin said, "and in doing that, they kind of removed his soul." He admitted he still sees it in detail thirty years later, and that the 1984 film adaptation, however earnest, could not approximate what his sixteen-year-old imagination had constructed on that long bus ride. Both readers agreed the novel deserves a full miniseries treatment — eight hours, nothing cut. The session closed with a playful but pointed creative prompt from Tom: if you could enter the story and rewrite it, what would you change? Aydin said he would find a way to give Winston and Julia a less annihilating ending, and would see the Party's architects brought down. Tom imagined a sequel set in 1990, the real-world year when walls fell and regimes crumbled across Eastern Europe — a version of Oceania that might look, he offered, something like The Hunger Games crossed with a velvet revolution. It was a hopeful coda to a conversation that had spent most of its time in the dark, which is, perhaps, exactly where Nineteen Eighty-Four asks us to sit before we can imagine the light.