The modern world ... the last two thousand years — just oughtn’t to have happened.

[I]t tickles me, in 1938, to find someone objecting to having a radio in the house. Porteous was strolling up and down in his usual dreamy way, with his hands in his coat pockets and his pipe between his teeth, and almost instantly he’d begun talking about some law against musical instruments that was passed in Athens in the time of Pericles. It’s always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he’d start telling you about Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he’s never been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the modern world — and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand years — just oughtn’t to have happened.

G. Orwell, Coming up for Air (1939), 155

But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite, because he’s what they call a Trotskyist

Immediately in front of me the local Communist Party branch were sitting. All three of them very young. One of them’s got money and is something in the Hesperides Estate Company, in fact I believe he’s old Crum’s nephew. Another’s a clerk at one of the banks. He cashes cheques for me occasionally. A nice boy, with a 

round, very young, eager face, blue eyes like a baby, and hair so fair that you’d think he peroxided it. He only looks about seventeen, though I suppose he’s twenty. He was wearing a cheap blue suit and a bright blue tie that went with his hair. Next to these three another Communist was sitting. But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite, because he’s what they call a Trotskyist. The others have got a down on him. He’s even younger,a very thin, very dark, nervous-looking boy. Clever face. Jew, of course. These four were taking the lecture quite differently from the others. You knew they’d be on their feet the moment question-time started. You could see them kind of twitching already. And the little Trotskyist working himself from side to side on his bum in his anxiety to get in ahead of the others.

G. Orwell, Coming up for Air (1939), 147

All their vitality has been drained away by lack of money

It was through Hilda that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money. In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities — that’s to say on incomes which never get bigger and generally get smaller — there’s more sense of poverty, more crust-wiping, and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are at the school-age. Consequently they grow up, especially the girls, with a fixed idea not only that one always IS hard-up but that it’s one’s duty to be miserable about it.

G. Orwell, Coming up for air (1939), 136-7

Science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common, the gizmos are less plausible and may include wands)

"Science fiction" is the box in which her work is usually placed, but it's an awkward box: it bulges with the discards from elsewhere. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don't for comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlour of historical fiction, or other compartmentalized (sic) genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels of war, crime and spies. Its subdivisions include science fiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common, the gizmos are less plausible and may include wands); and speculative fiction (human society and its possible future form, which are either much better than what we have now or much worse). However the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from the one to another is the norm.

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 115

Don't ride a bicycle. They'll think you're a communist and run you off the road

Tuscaloosa and Alabama provided another kind of flavour - that of a democracy, but one with quite a few constraining social customs and attitudes. ("Don't ride a bicycle," I was told. "They'll think you're a communist and run you off the road.")

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 87

There aren't many tunes you can hum in the shower.

As a story, the scientific mythos is not very comforting. Probably that's why it hasn't become wildly popular: we humans prefer stories that have a central role in them for us, that preserve some of our dignity, and that implies there might be help at hand if we really need some. The scientific version of our existence on this planet may well be physically true, but we don't like it much. It isn't cuddly. There aren't many tunes you can hum in the shower.

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 55

We may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right. ... As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that 'the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman's legs' was 'a commonplace' in Loyalist Spain. The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 215