The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 7:32 pm by Ken

‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’

I’m very happy to say that I have a short story, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’, in the first issue (Autumn 2021) of the new online science fiction, fantasy and horror magazine ParSec, edited by Ian Whates, now available here from PS Publishing .

The story has been long in the making. Sometime in the early 1990s I had an idea for a story called ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’, in which events like those of 1989 in our world happen in the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I wrote it and sent it to Interzone, and they sent me a kind rejection note suggesting that I try a local fanzine. I sent it to the local fanzine New Dawn Fades, and they rejected it. The editor softened the blow by encouraging me to write something else for them. They later accepted, I think, a review and a poem. But for the moment, I was done with short stories. After that, there was nothing for it but to write a novel.

That’s the story I’ve told now and again, usually with the punch-line that the best thing about the story was the title, because it tells you exactly what the story is about.

Now I’m going to have to retire that anecdote.

Earlier this year, shortly after I had read that Orwell’s fiction was now out of copyright, Ian Whates emailed me to ask for a story for a new venture he was planning. I pitched ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’. Ian was keen, so I looked at my old story (or what I could find of it), decided it was beyond help, and wrote an entirely new story. I’m fairly sure it’s an improvement on my first attempt.

One inspiration for the new version was the article ‘If there is Hope’ by Tony Keen, in Journey Planet #3 (pdf). Another was the article Orwell on Workers and Other Animals, by Gwydion M. Williams, which makes the intriguing point that 1945 is missing from the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

While writing the story I chanced on a clue to Orwell’s pessimism that, as far as I know, has escaped scholarly attention. Orwell, it turns out, had read and been impressed by George Walford's pamphlet The Intellectual and the People.

Walford drew on his mentor Harold Walsby's The Domain of Ideologies, the founding text of what Walford later called Systematic Ideology. This argued that the major social outlooks form a historical, numerical, and political series in decreasing order of antiquity, size, unity, and radicalism. The (historically) oldest and (currently) largest group is the apolitical, followed by the conservative, the reformist, the revolutionary, and the anarchist ... with the tiniest, least effectual and most extreme group being the Systematic Ideologists themselves, who understand the whole process but can't think what to do about it.

More about this another time, but it seems to me significant that Orwell attributed political apathy, ignorance and indifference to – not 'perhaps the largest single group' of the population, as Walford did – but to the vast majority: 85%.