Ask HN: Why aren't there any cars in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
1948. War just over. The 57 Chevy and the culture it represents, one which I consumed in Hot Wheels form as a 70s kid, did not exist yet. No society, not even America, had put in a thoroughly modern highway system (aside from the Autobahn, maybe, but...), let alone rearranged their entire society&#x27;s topology around individual use of high-fuel-consumption pleasure vehicles. Even here in North America, that was being planned, but not here yet.<p>And Orwell was an Englishman writing in bombed-out, austerity-ridden, digging-itself-out-from-an-apocalypse England. Even today, they don&#x27;t have the car culture that we have here, and I&#x27;ve seen a lot of pictures of horse and carts wending their way around the ruins of post-war London. I&#x27;m sure there were plenty of cars around, driven by dignitaries and princes and whatsorts, but I don&#x27;t think they were used daily to get to work by your typical file clerk, or your typical village farmer, etc.<p>It wouldn&#x27;t even have occurred to him to write about a character&#x27;s relationship with their car, or their even owning a personal car that wasn&#x27;t tied to their profession (milk truck, taxicab, chauffeur), anymore than he would write about their tractor if the characters were agrarians; as much as the industrial revolution was in the distant past, the age of ubiquitous personal technology and obscene consumption had yet to be born.<p>I am reminded of something from way deep in my brain&#x27;s cellar, some sort of quasi-fascist screed by a Futurist artist or writer from the 30s about a marvelous &quot;race-automobile&quot; or something, but it was something completely different from the 50s-diner drive-in-movie car culture that is the background mythology we live with. More of a &quot;let it all burn and bring the future forth!&quot; kind of nihilist thing. I tried to google it but this was literally a class I took in high school in the 80s, sorry.<p>Anyways, 1984 is an incredibly pessimistic novel about the future he saw coming, so any of his characters enjoying the sort of expansive freedom that I have, where I could literally walk out my door right now and be thousands of miles from here in a couple of days with nobody saying boo about it... even if it was a story of a personal struggle against a totalitarian state, it would be a different story than one where he runs the risk of being denounced by name in front of his entire society if he doesn&#x27;t work hard enough at his morning exercise under the state&#x27;s watchful eye. One that it would have been fairly magically prescient on his part to be able to extrapolate from his lived experience.