Who controls the past controls the future.
George Orwell, 1984
Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell might have been alluding to the dangers of stealth-editing when he wrote these lines for his 1949 dystopian novel. It’s funny to think that a work of fiction once so futuristic is now “so old” it no longer has copyright protection, but it’s true, as true as two plus two is… four. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel entered the public domain in the United Kingdom this year. With Orwell’s final book hitting the bestseller lists at various times during the last decade (pretty impressive for a 70-plus-year-old work), I expect we’ll see numerous U.K.-based publishers coming out with their own creative editions. The first-ever graphic novel adaptation is already slated for release in August.
The cover for 1984: The Graphic Novel is pictured here. Is that a road the slumped man is standing on, afraid, or incapable, of taking another step? Or is it the sickening light of surveillance from which none can escape?
Decades of high-schoolers have been taxed with comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – a jollier version of the future in which the masses are entertained into subjugation – to the harsh and colorless dystopia of Orwell’s vision. Thought Police, memory holes, doublethink, manic caged rats, the very word Orwellian has meanings even for those who never read the book, and none of them good.
In a letter dated 21 October 1949 (reprinted on the Letters of Note website), Aldous Huxley thanked George Orwell for sending him a copy of his book, and discussed the implications of the ideas each explored in his novel. Within a generation, Huxley concluded, “the world’s rulers will discover that… the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
What a phrase… “suggesting people” into doing something.
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Bibliography
“Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, 21 October 1949,” Letters of Note website, accessed 5 February 2021, https://lettersofnote.com/2012/03/06/1984-v-brave-new-world/.