1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Atwood has written about Orwell as a direct model, including an introduction to 1984 itself, and the structural borrowing is unmistakable: both novels end with an academic appendix set long after the regime has fallen. Orwell closes on a note about Newspeak; Atwood closes on the Symposium on Gileadean Studies, where a professor makes jokes about the woman whose recording we have just heard. Both devices do the same work, telling you the tyranny ended without letting that be a comfort.

Brooker's anthology is the Orwellian apparatus rebuilt out of consumer technology, and the series says so in its structure: the surveillance is not imposed by a ministry, it is bought, enjoyed and rated. The specific inheritance is Orwell's insistence that the machinery matters less than the consent. Fifteen Million Merits is Room 101 rearranged as a talent show; The Entire History of You is the memory hole run backwards, with nothing forgettable. Filed MEDIUM: the debt is to a tradition Orwell defined rather than to a text Brooker adapts, and the series is at least as indebted to The Twilight Zone for its shape.

Alan Moore named Orwell among his influences in "Behind the Painted Smile", his essay on writing V for Vendetta. The comic's near-future Britain is a fascist state of surveillance cameras and listening devices whose leader worships a computer, and its resistance begins, as Winston's does, with one person refusing it.

Shot in and around London in the actual months the novel is set in, which was the production's stated intention. It follows Orwell's text closely, including the Newspeak appendix's logic and the ending as written rather than the softened one earlier adaptations used.

The reality format takes its name and premise from Orwell: a group of strangers living in a house where every room is watched by cameras around the clock. The Dutch creators named it after the ruler whose posters warn that Big Brother is watching you, and turned his surveillance into entertainment.

Orwell went to Spain in December 1936 to report and joined the POUM militia instead. Homage to Catalonia is what he came back with, and it is the book where every component of Nineteen Eighty-Four first appears as reportage. The Party line changing overnight and yesterday's ally becoming an unperson; newspapers reporting battles that did not happen and omitting ones he had been present at; the police apparatus of a nominally revolutionary government hunting its own side. He wrote that in Spain he saw "history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened", which is the sentence the Ministry of Truth is built out of. Orwell named the experience himself as the turning point: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism."