Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by George Orwell. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation dictated by a political system in the government's invented language, Newspeak, called Ingsoc under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrimes." The tyranny is epitomized by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Nineteen Eighty-Four popularized the adjective Orwellian, which describes official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation of the past by a totalitarian or authoritarian state.