1984: A Year With Gravity

Ministry of Plenty

It’s 2024. It’s 40 years since 1984. So I guess that’s why there have been a lot of things turning up that are related in one way or another to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four1. It’s considerably more than forty years since the novel was published: more like 75 years. Which is a memorable enough number in itself.

At Worldcon in Glasgow in August, the last panel I went to was about the book. People discussing when they had first read it, how it had affected them, the effects it had on literature and culture more broadly, and so on.

Then a few weeks later the podcast of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time dropped into my feed, with an episode about it. It was described as a ‘summer repeat’. I assume the programme is off the air but they like to keep the feed fed. It was originally broadcast in 2022, so nothing to do with any anniversaries in this year, but no matter.

All of this served to remind me of two things: one, that it was high time I read it again. And two, since read it in my teenage years and never since, I had shamefully never quite read all of it. Because there’s that bit in the middle where Winston is reading ‘The Book’, as it’s called. And when you’re fourteen or fifteen that can seem terribly dull and easily skippable.

Also at the convention2 I picked up a copy of Ken MacLeod’s new collection, A Jura for Julia. You might guess from the title that there’s some sort of connection, what with Julia being the only female character in the original book, and Jura being where Orwell spent the last months of his life writing it.

And indeed, the collection is bookended by two connected stories comprising a sequel to Orwell’s novel.

So I was going to revisit the original and then read Ken’s stories. But I realised I didn’t actually have a copy. I think I read it from the library all those years ago. We got our son a copy at some point, but that’s either with him or in a box in the basement. So I decided just to buy a new one.

While I was in Foyles I noticed another connected work: Julia by Sandra Newman. I remembered reading about this when it came out and thinking I’d like to read it. It’s a retelling of the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Julia’s point of view. It came out last year, so I’m sure author and publisher had anniversaries in mind, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Not Forever

So what about these books, then?

There are two things Ingsoc got right, I mention in passing: going over properly to the metric system — which leads to the oddity of a prole barman who has never even heard of a pint — and going to full use of the twenty-four-hour clock, giving us that famously startling opening line about the clocks striking thirteen.

Not much else, though. It’s a bit odd thinking about it now that the ideology is called ‘English Socialism’ when the geopolitical bloc Airstrip One is part of, Oceania, is clearly dominated by America. The renaming of the UK makes that clear. And indeed, the switch to decimal measurements and twenty-four-hour time are even stranger, given how America in our world is the biggest holdout against those.

I suppose the ‘English’ in ‘Ingsoc’ could mean the language. But a socialism dominated by America? Something that calls itself socialism, at least: it’s no more socialism than Germany’s ‘National Socialism’ was.

I’ve said before that I dislike dystopian fiction as genre or background to stories. I wonder if that dislike was caused in part by early inoculation with this work. But what I found really weird about reading it after all these years is how weirdly cosy it all felt. Maybe it’s just because I knew what happens; maybe because there are these sequels by other hands to consider; or it could be somehow inherent in the writing. But I had no real sense of bleakness, nor even of menace. Strange, really.

It is, of course, a tragedy, among other things. Winston and Julia know that they’ll be caught by the Thought Police and taken to the Ministry of Love eventually; but they believe that, whatever they have to go through, there will be a core of them, deep in their hearts, that will survive, uncorrupted, undefeated. I was reminded of Evey, in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. About how you’ll survive — maybe win — as long as they can never reach that last half inch of you (I write from probably inaccurate memory).

That turns out not to be true for Winston and Julia, as they each betray the other. O’Brien’s assertion that ‘We will empty you out and fill you up with us’ proves true; and the novel closes with Winston loving Big Brother. There is no hope. A boot stamping on a human face.

Except, then we get the appendix. It tells the story of Newspeak, and does so wholly in the past tense, describing plans the party had for the minimal, stripped-down language. How it was expected to limit the capability for thoughtcrime — for thought itself — in the populace forced to use it. But it is presented as if it were an academic work, part of a history of the Big Brother times in what was then called Airstrip One, and is now called Britain again.

Hope in an appendix. I like it.

Keeping it Short

So we come to the first sequel I want to speak of, which is composed of Ken MacLeod’s two short stories. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’ picks up on Winston’s story. He’s taken from the Chestnut Tree café thinking he’s finally going to be killed. But in fact it’s the revolution. Big Brother and the party are overthrown. Winston is to be Minister of Truth in the new government.

And then in ‘A Jura for Julia’ it’s a decade or two later. Julia is a researcher in ‘computational literature’, mechanical writing. She used to be a mechanic who worked on the machines that created cheap novels for the proles. Now she’s an academic studying the technology behind the machines. She travels to Jura because she has heard there is an important link there to the history of the machines. What she finds ties her story and Winston’s together with Orwell’s in a fascinating way.

A Woman’s Perspective

I hadn’t heard of Sandra Newman before Julia, but she’s written several books, and been nominated for various awards. This one is authorised by Orwell’s estate and tells the familiar story from Julia’s perspective, expanding it both in worldbuilding, character, and time.

It’s a much richer story than Orwell’s, in that Julia’s character is dramatically expanded from the original, and we learn a great deal about the society, or the various societies that exist in Airstrip One. It’s all well done, very convincing, and completely in keeping with the original. There’s nothing added that couldn’t have been imagined in Orwell’s time.

Julia the character is not much more than a cipher in the original, and here she has a rich inner life, and is wonderfully and believably changeable.

One chapter opens with the line, ‘She was in Love.’ Which jars you for a second, because the previous chapter ended with her and Winston’s arrest. Till you remember that she refers to the ministries just by their key words: ‘Truth’ for the Ministry of Truth, and so on.

It takes us to a an ending not so very different from MacLeod’s but perhaps a more ambiguous one.

And that’s enough Nineteen Eighty-Four for a while, and enough 1984, too, though it strikes me that the novel I’m writing at the moment is set then. It’s a year that still has a massive gravitational pull on the imagination.


  1. Note that the title is always written in words and properly hyphenated. ↩︎

  2. Strictly I ordered it afterwards, as it was sold out at the con by the time I tried to get it. ↩︎

Finished reading: Julia by Sandra Newman 📚

As I said about Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, a bigger post is coming.


Books 2024, 20

Finished reading: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 📚

I’m going to write a bigger post about all the Nineteen Eighty-Four-related things I’ve read, listened to, or attended recently, and I’ll link to it here when I do.

And here it is.


Books 2024, 19

Adam's Rib, 1949 - ★★½

Moderately amusing Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film about two lawyers. He's an assistant DA, she's a defence attorney. How could they not end up on two sides of the same case? Could it be about anything other than a woman trying to shoot her philandering husband?

It's pretty good on discussing the law and how it should be applied, though not exactly deep. Enjoyable enough, though.

Evil Under the Sun, 1982 - ★★½

After our recent slow binge of the TV Poirot series, which I don't think I've written about here, a small look at one of the other actors who played the great Belgian detective. To wit, Peter Ustinov.

At first I didn't think I was going to enjoy this. Ustinov isn't David Suchet, and all the other actors seemed to be hamming it up to almost comical levels. But it settled down and/or I adjusted to it. I enjoyed it enough on the whole.

Not a great detective movie, but a pleasant enough one.

I love that today’s Xkcd (probably strictly yesterday’s) celebrates the closure of the UK’s last coal-fired powerstation in such a British way: do all the sums in metric, then convert at the last to inches.

California Suite, 1978 - ★★★

This quadripartite tale of four groups (three couples and one pair of couples) at a Los Angeles hotel on the night of the Oscars is, inevitably, a tale of parts.

We decided to watch in honour of Maggie Smith, who died the other day, and who won an Oscar for her role as an actress nominated for an Oscar. That feels like a sort of irony, but is nothing to do with the film itself.

To my mind we have two good stories — the Maggie Smith/Michael Caine and the Jane Fonda/Alan Alda ones — and two others that vary from farce to racist stereotyping, without adding much to the overall experience.

Which is a shame, because the two good parts are pretty good.

Let my phone update to iOS 18 overnight, and this morning… it’s hard to see the difference.

There wasn’t even a message saying, ‘Your phone was updated…’

Currently reading: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 📚

So many editions, and none of them with quite the cover I have: a self-portrait by Francis Bacon.

It must be 40, 45 years since I last read this and there are currently a lot of sequels and connected works I want to read, so I thought I’d go back to the source.

Finished reading: Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson 📚

If there’s a record for the longest gap between volumes of a series of collections, I think we all know that there’s only one real contender. Though to win it, JMS’s The Last Dangerous Visions will have to actually be released (which, at the time of writing, is scheduled to happen next month, amazingly).

Second on the list, though, might be Nova Scotia. The first volume was published in 2005, to more-or-less coincide with the second Glasgow Worldcon. Nineteen years later all is well, as Volume 2 is published to more-or-less coincide with this year’s Glasgow Worldcon.

And it is again, very good, and very varied. I’m not going to go through the stories, but it struck me that three of them concern someone being resurrected — woken from cryogenic stasis, or reconstructed from DNA and memories — in a future that might not be quite what they had expected or hoped for. A couple of others include bringing back extinct species, or sentient life coming to entities that are not (to the best of our knowledge) sentient at present.

I doubt the stories were chosen deliberately to have those connections. Rather, perhaps this is how our current end-of-the-world fears are playing out: in fantasies of technological afterlives. Not that such stories are particularly new, but maybe they’re particularly now.

Notable contributors: Ken McLeod, of course, Scotland’s premier living SF author. James Kelman, surprisingly: as one of Scotland’s best-known literary authors, it’s pleasing that he’d lower himself into our genre murk. Grant Morrison, Scotland’s best known comics writer, I imagine. And plenty others.


Books 2024, 18

What's Up, Doc?, 1972 - ★★★★

Fancied watching a screwball comedy. I remember seeing this with my parents when I was a kid. They loved it, and so did I.

Turns out it stands up pretty well. Four people arrive in San Francisco and check into the same hotel. They have identical suitcases. What could possibly go wrong?

Contains what was probably the first car chase I ever saw, and remained the funniest until, I'd guess, I first saw The Blues Brothers.

Finished reading: The Library of the Dead by T. L. Huchu 📚

I saw Tendai (as is his name) interviewed at Worldcon last month. Went along without knowing anything about him or his writing, and the interview was interesting enough that I went and bought this in the dealers' room immediately afterwards. Or maybe the next day, but you get the idea.

It’s the first of the Edinburgh Nights series, which I think is currently at three books with a fourth on the way and a fifth planned. Which means it kind of violates one of my personal guidelines to have bought it, but what the hell, you know?

Anyway, it’s set in an alternative Edinburgh where there’s magic. The time is approximately the present day, because there’s things like smartphones. But our heroine, Ropa, can talk to ghosts, which tend to hang about when they’ve got unfinished business back on the plane of the living.

And a whole lot more happens besides. It’s a pretty bleak environment that she lives in, essentially a shanty town of caravans on the edge of the city, very much hand to mouth. It feels kind of post-apocalypse, but I don’t think there’s been anything quite as disastrous as that, just a slow decline. Not sure, though, there are hints at things. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.

As far as the ‘Don’t start a series that the author hasn’t finished writing’ guideline goes, it’s pretty standalone, thought with plenty of setup for more.


Books 2024, 17

Finished reading: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson 📚

I mentioned in the last books post that I’ve seen the Jackson Brodie TV series. Well, maybe not all of them. I enjoyed the latest book in the series so much that I thought I’d go back and read the earlier ones. This is the first, and the story was completely unfamiliar to me.

It was also surprisingly horrific. It starts by setting up three ‘case histories’, with three stories of crimes at different times in the past: a young girl disappears; a young woman is murdered; another young woman murders her husband.

Then we’re introduced to Jackson Brodie: divorced and trying to co-parent a young daughter and carry on his life, while also trying to run a private detective agency in Cambridge, a city he hates.

Somehow, all these cases are going to come together and get solved. As I said about the latest book, though, it’s clear that Atkinson’s writing about the minutiae of the human heart, far more than the minutiae of detective work. And that’s OK.

It’s an enjoyable, easy read — well, apart from the gruesomeness and tension of the first three chapters — and intriguingly it ends as if Brodie’s career it over. I don’t know if she planned to write sequels, but clearly something must change.


Books 2024, 16

The Death of Stalin, 2017 - ★★

It's a comedy, but I have to say, I find very little humour in it. Especially not the first half.

Certainly there's farce: moving Stalin's body around, all that. But the terror, the killings, the torture, the rape: none of it shown, exactly, but all right there in front of you. It's mostly just too fucking serious for me to laugh at it.

Finished reading: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson 📚

I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.

We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.1 But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.

Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?


Books 2024, 15


  1. Not really titular: Brodie’s name doesn’t appear in the title, after all. ↩︎

Finished reading: The Last Dark: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 4 by Stephen Donaldson 📚

When the final chronicles were first announced, and indeed on the first two books, it was referred to as a trilogy. I assume that the third volume just became so long that the publishers, and probably Donaldson himself, decided it needed to be split in two. Each of the third and fourth volumes is about the same length, anyway.

And they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, that’s the main thing. Of course Linden hesitates, and Covenant resists using wild magic (but not to the extent he once did). Of course Donaldson uses fifty words where fifteen would do. Of course his writerly tics come through.

But the pages keep turning, and old friends and enemies turn up, and Wild Magic, Law, and Earthpower do their things, and we all leave satisfied.


Books 2024, 14

Murder on the Orient Express, 1974 - ★★

We've been watching the old Poirot TV series, inspired by me getting the book this film is based on last Christmas. More on the series later, perhaps, but it drops in quality in later seasons, when the production company changes.

And in season 12 it does Murder on the Orient Express and it frankly does quite a bad job of it. Not least in the suddenly-Catholic Poirot's struggle with his conscience.

Having him struggling with his conscience over his decision at the end isn't automatically a bad thing. But in the context of the series, it's just not the same character as earlier.

However, we're talking about the 1974 Sidney Lumet film version here. It's no more than OK. If you didn't know the story maybe it would be better, but I'm not sure. It's quite a stellar cast, and most of the individual parts are played well, but in the end it all just comes out as not very good.

Maybe the source material is to blame. Or more likely, the setting. It's like a bottle episode, in that it almost entirely takes place on the train. That maybe doesn't lend itself well to good cinema.

Finished reading: The Legend of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot 📚

I didn’t even realise there was a third (and final?) volume in Talbot’s Luther Arkwright chronicles. Until friends mentioned it at worldcon.

I ordered it immediately. It’s really good, right up there with the earlier ones. In this there turns out to be an even more highly-evolved, more powerful human than Arkwright and co. And they do not have the best interest of anyone but themself at heart.


Books 2024, 13

Well, I guess that was the last working day of my fifties.

Big Thief were good, if tending toward the prog at times.