Word: orwellian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that are sometimes required for employment. Worse still, he feels, could be the impact of computers. Already Americans leave a detailed trail of vital data about themselves-insurance questionnaires, loan applications, census forms, employment applications, tax returns, military and school records. If all of these are gathered into one Orwellian information bank, as some officials have proposed, a man's life may well be available at the punch of a button. When all financial transactions begin to be carried out by a universal credit-card and automatic-bill paying system, Westin says that hardly a corner...
...world is quite like Brasilia, the seven-year-old vision of tomorrow carved out of the wilderness. Its unfinished cathedral is designed in the shape of a gigantic crown of concrete thorns. Its Congress building looks like a huge cup and saucer. Its population areas are laid out in Orwellian modules, with all the foreign-ministry officials living here, the bank employees there, the military officers over there. Artificially created to open up the frontier and shift the country's balance westward, Brasilia was long considered the "mad city" that Ku-bitschek built, was shunned by officials, who preferred...
...walk-on took only four minutes, but its Orwellian impact unsettled even hard-boiled Communist newsmen. Through a curtained doorway in Hanoi marched a husky American prisoner of war clad in purple and cream striped pajamas. He looked healthy enough, except for his eyes; as the strobe lights winked, they remained as fixed and flat as blazer buttons. Then, at a word from his captors, the American bowed deeply from the waist like a Manchurian candi date, repeating the abject gesture in all directions about a dozen times. At an other command, he turned on his sandaled heel and marched...
...VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. Published 16 years after it was written, this early satirical distillation of Burgess' comic imagination is worthy of his later (1963) Orwellian Clockwork Orange. A Vision unfolds the misadventures of a mild-mannered sergeant in the British Army Vocational and Cultural Corps who muddles through World War II in the incongruous bastion of imperial Britannia atop the rock of Gibraltar...
...painful to Novelist Burgess that he suppressed it for so long. Yet he must have known that on the surface it was an amazingly successful first novel, showing his later power to move into the past with Nothing like the Sun, his Elizabethan tour de force, or the Orwellian future with The Clockwork Orange (TIME, Feb. 15, 1963). Burgess has said that he was surprised to find that Vision turned out to be a funny book. Perhaps this seriousness is the clue to his comic flair; the human world is a masque; both gods and demons speak through the disguise...