I started reading Orwell's 1984 a couple of days ago and I couldn't go past 5 pages. True, it *was* midnight, so maybe that helped in letting it go, but I realized something the next day.
From what I read (and I know the story, the 'message'- wiki), it was a somewhat correct depiction of the general feeling that people in Eastern Europe felt during the communist years, but it was so exaggerated...It was a painful read and, most importantly, boring.
I understand the term 'dystopia', I understand that it has exaggerations, but such a society could.not.exist. The mixture of elements simply makes such a 'construction' impossible. More believable is Huxley's Brave New World, but that one portrays the human being as just hedonistic, and that is simply untrue. If man craved only pleasure, his book would have never been written. All in all, these texts not only bore me, but seem to me to be simply expressions of fear.
But I remembered the reverse - utopias. And then it hit me - these are just modern (well, modern...there are utopias written from antiquity onward) heaven and hell depictions. Nothing more. I know it seems such a big difference - what's 'punishing your sins in an eternal pit of fire' have in common with 'a totalitarian government is watching you, cameras are everywhere and you can't say what you really think'? well, they're both untrue, for one. also, they scare you and, last, but not least, they give you a wrong perception of what a human being is. It seems so weird to me that all these texts ignore the bigger context - the natural one, and focus so much on the human-created environment, coming up with outlandish stuff.
Now, I'm not particularly interested in correcting people's mistakes or beliefs, but I do have a huge list of books on my disk (and it's enough to visit some bookmarked sites and I can add a few hundreds easily) and for me utopias and dystopias are classified under 'bullshit, not gonna happen' category now. Yeah, I read a short version of the Bible and some sensible bits. To me, 1984 and (let's give an utopia name) City of Sun look like modern Bible bits to me, kind of saying "I dream of..." (and you can have nightmares or sweet dreams).
Anyway, it's a long text, I'm wondering who will ever read this, but if you do, and you have an opinion, you can write it down here, maybe. I am more interested in opinions that disagree with mine, though it is unlikely I will change my conclusion.