1984 (1948)
Author: George Orwell
The time is 13 o'clock; the date doesn't matter; the year goes without saying. Winston Smith, a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth, toils day and night in the service of Big Brother, the remote, faux-benign ruler of this eerily familiar dystopia. Orwell's novel is a study of every possible way a nation can be beaten down by its government: spiritually, physically, intellectually, by the media, torture, surveillance, and censorship, to the point where the state can manipulate reality at will. When Smith is tempted by a beautiful resistance fighter into an act of rebellion, 1984 becomes something more: a strange, tragic, deeply sad love story. It is Orwell's triumph, and the century's misfortune, that 1984 is as prescient as it is pessimistic.—L.G.
From the TIME Archive:
In 1984 there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell's utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years' time 
Where the Rainbow Ends
In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism). After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth's most trusted forgers; he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: "Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc," i.e., "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism."
How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain's George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 (which, along with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain —see below—is the Book-of-the-Month Club's selection for July), there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell's utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years' time.
Absolutely Super. In Orwell's 1984, Britain is no longer Britain. It is merely part of the superstate Oceania (the British Isles and Atlantic Islands, North and South America, southern Africa, Australasia). From 1960 on, Oceania has been ceaselessly at war, sometimes as ally and sometimes as foe, with Eurasia or Eastasia, the only other existing powers. All three of these monolithic superstates have the atom bomb; none ever uses it because continuous, wasteful, indecisive warfare has become economically essential—"to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living."
Ideologically, Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia have no quarrel; they are alike as three blackjacks. But war has turned out to be the simplest way of convincing the masses that their countries and their lives are in a state of emergency, which can only be met if all thought, as well as all government, is subject to absolute dictatorship. Hence the three great slogans that Oceania's wretched citizens read and hear every hour of their lives:
WAR is PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,997927,00.html?internalid=atb100
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