Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949.The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government's invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrime".The tyranny is epitomised by Big Brother, the Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality but who may not even exist.