Comment by Wildgoose

Indeed - to be honest, given Asimov's well known socialist sympathies I read it as a tiresome screed that deliberately misinterpreted Orwell's writing - part of the socialist sectarianism that Asimov himself alludes to but which he is clearly guilty of himself.

For example, it is well known that the concept of Newspeak actually originated as a dystopian version of Esperanto, not at all as just "abbreviations".

Furthermore "1984" never suggests that people are under constant surveillance, just that they never know when they are being watched.

And as for the idea of using computers for the surveillance, we are talking about a man who in his own SF stories, (written after 1948 which was when Orwell wrote "1984"), still had his scientists pulling out slide rules to do calculations.

Sorry, but this just reads as a deliberate hatchet job.

I concur - far from one of Asimov's best works.