Here in the twenty-twenties, a young reader first hearing of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would hardly imagine it to be a work of science fiction. That wouldn’t have been the case in 1949, when the novel was first published, and when the eponymous year would have sounded like the distant future. Even as the actual nineteen-eighties came around, it still evoked visions of a techno-totalitarian dystopia ahead. “So thoroughly has 1984-ophobia penetrated the consciousness of many who have not read the book and have no notion of what it contains, that one wonders what will happen to us after 31 December 1984,” wrote Isaac Asimov in 1980. “When New Year’s Day of 1985 arrives and the United States is still in existence and facing very much the problems it faces today, how will we express our fears of whatever aspect of life fills us with apprehension?”
The occasion was one of a series of syndicated newspaper columns that Asimov seems to have published each new year. At the dawn of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s decade, the syndicate asked him to revisit Orwell’s novel, which had already been a common cultural reference for decades. As a work of science fiction (the genre for which his own name had practically come to stand), he finds it lacking, to say the least. “The London in which the story is placed is not so much moved thirty-five years forward in time, from 1949 to 1984, as it is moved a thousand miles east in space to Moscow,” he writes. Far from attempting to imagine the future, in Asimov’s view, Orwell simply converted the England he knew into a dreary Stalinist-type state. Apart from certain implausible surveillance systems, the setting is “incredibly old-fashioned when compared with the real world of the 1980s.”
Orwell doesn’t even bother to imagine any new vices: “His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts,” Asimov writes, “and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.” That telling detail hints at one of Orwell’s major sources of inspiration: the British Ministry of Information, his wife’s employer during World War II, and the source of the material he broadcast to India while working at the BBC around the same time. The Ministry’s canteen, according to his letters, was not of the highest standard. What’s more, the 850-word “Basic English” that it insisted on using in its broadcasts bears more than a passing resemblance to Nineteen Eight-Four’s Newspeak, the pared-down language developed and mandated by the government in order to limit its citizens’ range of thought.
Asimov doesn’t buy that either. “There is no sign that such compressions of the language have ever weakened it as a mode of expression,” he writes. “As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use many words rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to reduce.” (This, of course, was something Orwell knew.) Whatever Nineteen Eighty-Four’s shortcomings as prophecy, sci-fi, or indeed literature, Asimov does credit Orwell with a certain geopolitical savvy. Its world-ruling trio of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia “fits in, very roughly, with the three actual superpowers of the 1980s: the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.” Orwell knew, as many didn’t, that the latter two would not join forces, perhaps thanks to his own frustrating experience fighting for factionalism-prone left causes. But not even as future-oriented a mind as Asimov’s would have guessed that, just a few years later, the USSR would be out of the game — and a few decades later, the word Orwellian would be applied most often to China.
Read Asimov’s take on 1984 here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
