It would be more accurate to call them obsessions. I consume both in their entirety at least once a year, and have read everything there is to read about their creators. Their styles couldn't be more opposite – naive space fantasy vs. ultimate hard-nosed dystopia — but both are exquisite examples of worldbuilding. 

And both returned to our world with a bang in the 2010s, when they were needed more than ever. Star Wars topped the all-time box office charts; 2016 happened, and 1984 came back to the bestseller lists, where it has bounced around ever since. (It has also cropped up in protest signs around the world.) 

In a talk I gave mid-decade, ironically named The Lighter Side of 1984! (spoiler alert, there's no light side, not even in the tale of its creation), I noted the world Orwell built has staying power for one reason alone. It's so airtight that it puts all subsequent dystopias to shame. 

There's no poking holes in the Party's control, no loose thread for any opposition to pull. If there is a Resistance, it vanishes halfway through. The book is designed to make The Party and its machinery of oppression look entirely infallible. You accept, like the protagonist Winston Smith, that it can never be overthrown. This isn't The Hunger Games. There is no cartoonish YA villain like President Snow for a defiant Katniss Everdeen to topple. Even Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, destroyed Gilead in a far-future postscript.