The BBC headquarters in London is getting a new resident: he's tall, bronze and likes a smoke. From Tuesday a statue of novelist George Orwell is to adorn the exterior of New Broadcasting House, a few minutes from where Orwell worked as a radio producer in World War Two. But what was the author of Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell's original worded title) doing in the BBC? For decades its staff have delighted in the suggestion Orwell took his notion of absolute hell from two years spent at the BBC. Near the end of Nineteen Eighty-four (1984 is now more commonly used on book covers), Winston Smith finds himself trapped in the Ministry of Love's Room 101, "many metres underground".

The Dystopia Project is Mashable's ongoing book series reflecting on what dystopian fiction has to teach us under our new political climate. When you think of mid-20th century dystopias, most people go right to Brave New World (1932) or Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). What you're unlikely to think of? Possibly because you've never read it. Even though it hails from the faded age of gee-whizz atomic-powered sci-fi stories, Isaac Asimov's classic has a lot to offer 21st century America.

These are the remembered phrases of George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," about a futuristic totalitarian state run by "Big Brother." It surged to the top of Amazon's best-seller list Wednesday–President Donald Trump's sixth day in office. According to CNN, Penguin has begun printing more copies of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" to meet the demand. The increase in sales appears to have started after Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway used the term "alternative facts" in an interview Sunday, which British historian and Orwell biographer Peter Stansky said was a phrase that "is very Orwellian, very'Newspeak.'" In "Nineteen Eighty-Four," "Newspeak" is the language of the state used to suppress thought. Stansky believes that the increase in sales of the novel, which Orwell wrote in 1949 as a warning to the Western world about the totalitarianism of his era, is a direct response to President Trump's efforts to manipulate facts during his first week in office.

When we started the Dystopia Project two weeks ago, with the aim of writing a story on every dystopian novel that might apply to the Trump presidency, we figured it would be a while before we had reason to cover the heavyweight champ of the genre: Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell's 1949 classic is about a state that is totalitarian in the extreme. Trump, we thought, would at least start out appearing to be more like a regular president than a Big Brother type. This week the plan was to explore how he resembles a smooth-talking manipulator in Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. But that was before Trump and his team spent their first weekend in power insisting that, when it came to crowd size, two plus two equals five.