It’s difficult to imagine sitting down and writing letters by hand every day; inking words onto a piece of paper, expressing long, well-thought out messages. To have pen and paper as a sole form of communication and being forced to wait in agony days for a response to a basic question. It’s simple, however, to picture sending a text message or video calling a loved one. No true sentiment or fluid language required for that. Today’s society is shaped by a love of technology, not linguistics. Power and wealth lie with those who are proficient in electronics. It is because of this that George Orwell’s Oceania is far more plausible world than Mark Dunn’s Nollop. In 1984, the Party squashes any rebellion by tracking every one of each citizen’s movements; between security cameras, telescreens, and undercover agents the characters have zero freedom. However, in Ella Minnow Pea the Council seizes power by screening letters and gradually shrinking the language because those are the thing the hyper-literate country of…show more content… Ella Minnow Pea is written with an amusing, almost lighthearted tone while 1984 never diverges from its pessimistic take on a world at war. Because Ella Minnow Pea conceals the darker sides of a dystopian society with comedy, it encourages the reader to pause a moment and consider what they have read. And when he or she does this, the novel is just as serious as 1984: relationships are torn apart and civilized people are driven insane by power or solitude and commit suicide. Despite this, the premise of 1984 is more realistic than that of Ella Minnow Pea: it’s the difference between an English social party seizing power and a government believing the spirit of their founder, whose crowning achievement is writing a sentence, wants the country to stop using certain letters based on the tiles that fall from his statue. It’s kind of a no brainer which could occur in modern