Which novel by George Orwell depicts a totalitarian future where Big Brother watches?

Which novel by George Orwell depicts a totalitarian future where Big Brother watches? The answer is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian novel imagines Winston Smith living in Oceania, a superstate ruled by the Party and its supposedly all-seeing leader, Big Brother.

The novel explores mass surveillance, propaganda, censorship, political repression, and the manipulation of historical truth. Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, where he alters old newspapers so that the official record always supports the Party. The regime also uses telescreens, the Thought Police, and Newspeak to limit both behavior and independent thought.

The title refers to the imagined year in which the story takes place, although the exact chronology is deliberately uncertain. The book was also published in the United States as 1984. Its concepts—including Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Room 101, and the memory hole—became part of everyday political and cultural language.

Animal Farm is another Orwell novel, but it is a political allegory about a revolution on a farm rather than the source of Big Brother. Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World are also famous dystopian novels, written by Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley respectively.