His hatred of all totalitarian regimes came into sharp focus in his “Day After Tomorrow” essay, published in The Nation just as he was about to finish the final draft of Fahrenheit 451: Consider the similarity of two books—Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” laid in our recent past, and George Orwell’s “1984,” set in our immediate future. And here we are, poised between the two, between a dreadful reality and an unformed terror, trying to make such decisions as will avoid the tyranny of the very far right and the tyranny of the very far left, the two of which can often be seen coalescing into a
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From a commentary at the back of the edition I read.
