ALSO BY DORIAN LYNSKEY 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs
Copyright © 2019 by Dorian Lynskey All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan UK, London. DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Cover design by Michael J. Windsor Cover images: buildings © watt indeed/Shutterstock; barbed wire © urbanbuzz/Shutterstock; © milart/Shutterstock; 1984 © Mopic/Shutterstock LCCN: 2019937137 Ebook ISBN9780385544061 9780385544054 v5.4_r1 ep
For Lucy, Eleanor and Rosa
It’s a sad commentary on our age that we find Dystopias a lot easier to believe in than Utopias: Utopias we can only imagine, Dystopias we’ve already had. —Margaret Atwood There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. —George Orwell,Nineteen Eighty-Four
Contents Cover Also by Dorian Lynskey Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Part One Chapter 1: History Stopped Chapter 2: Utopia Fever Chapter 3: The World We’re Going Down Into Chapter 4: Wells-World Chapter 5: Radio Orwell Chapter 6: The Heretic Chapter 7: Inconvenient Facts Chapter 8: Every Book Is a Failure Chapter 9: The Clocks Strike Thirteen Part Two Chapter 10: Black Millennium Chapter 11: So Damned Scared Chapter 12: Orwellmania Chapter 13: Oceania 2.0 Afterword Acknowledgements Appendix Notes
Illustration Credits A Note About the Author Illustrations
Introduction December 1948. A man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man. January 2017. Another man stands before a crowd, which is not as large as he would like, in Washington, DC, taking the oath of office as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. His press secretary later says that it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration —period—both in person and around the globe.” Asked to justify such a preposterous lie, the president’s adviser describes the statement as “alternative facts.” Over the next four days, US sales of the dead man’s book will rocket by almost 10,000 per cent, making it a number-one best seller. When George Orwell’sNineteen Eighty-Fourwas published in the United Kingdom on June 8, 1949, in the heart of the twentieth century, one critic wondered how such a timely book could possibly exert the same power over generations to come. Thirty-five years later, when the present caught up with Orwell’s future and the world was not the nightmare he had described, commentators again predicted that the book’s popularity would wane. Another thirty-five years have elapsed since then, and Nineteen Eighty-Fourremains the book we turn to when truth is
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