The making of brave new worlds
Our world may look different from the bureaucratic dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984, but the book’s key themes — totalitarianism, mass surveillance, the manipulation of truth — remain sadly universal.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time in the 1980s (ironically) and ’90s when the transparency and interconnectedness made possible by new technology sparked such exuberance that many retellings took the form of comedy and spoof, as even BBC poked fun at the idea of a technology-led dictatorship.
Let’s start with the earliest reinterpretations. Things got off to a rocky start when Michael Anderson’s 1956 film adaptation, steered by the Cia-linked American Committee for Cultural Freedom, was widely derided as Cold War propaganda. As a result, Sonia Orwell, sole heir to her husband’s estate, shied away, allowing barely any adaptations through the rest of her life.
Between the author’s death in 1950 and his wife’s in 1980 (after which literary agency AM Heath took over), artists had to find more creative ways to bring Oceania into their work.
Musicians, unburdened by the need for fidelity to text and plot, led the way. In 1973, fresh off the success of his tour as Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie proposed a rock-and-roll musical adaptation. When Sonia Orwell refused to sign off on it, he created an apocalyptic world of his own.
His 1974 album Diamond Dogs reimagines Orwell’s authoritarian state through the narcotic, postmodern lens — as a global ghetto full of junkies overseen by thought-manipulating surgeon thugs. References to the novel abound, including songs titled 1984 and Big Brother, but this is Oceania as England, c. 1970, awash in drugs, disaffection and proto-punk nihilism.
In 1983, English anarcho-punk band Subhumans released the album The Day the Country Died, a searing indictment of Thatcherite Britain (Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990) and the Cold War. Songs such as Big Brother and Subvert City conscript Orwell’s ideas into a doom-saying prophecy of mind-control and nuclear holocaust.
The iconic Radiohead track 2 + 2 = 5, released in 2003, takes its title from a phrase in the book about the difference between objective truth and “consensus” reality. (There is no way out / You can scream and you can shout / It is too late now / Because you have not been / Payin’ attention…)
Unreal realms
Anthony Burgess’s 1978 book 1985 was the first of many unofficial or “spiritual” sequels. It consists of a series of essays on the original work, and a dystopian novella set in 1985 Britain.
After Sonia Orwell’s death, and with the novel’s titular year approaching, the floodgates opened. In 1983, Hungarian author György Dalos published 1985, a spiritual sequel that begins with Big Brother’s death and hints at a more optimistic future. There was absurdist humour and satire, as in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian black comedy Brazil (1985), a film about a low-level government employee who stumbles into rebellion after falling in love. Gilliam has said that he was trying to make “the Nineteen Eighty-four for 1984”.
The BBC radio series Nineteen Ninety-four and Nineteen Ninety-eight, aired in 1985 and ’87, were sitcoms that parodied Orwell’s nightmare vision of authoritarianism. The cast included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Mike Myers. In some exuberant reimaginings from this period, technology was hailed as the hero.
On January 1, 1984, South Korean artist Nam June Paik broadcast Good Morning, Mr Orwell live on public television from studios in New York and Paris. The broadcast was a rebuttal to Orwell’s “cynicism”, and a celebration of the ways in which TV was connecting the world.
That sense of techno-utopianism has not aged well. In a time when the internet, social media and AI algorithms are viewed more as Frankenstein’s monsters than proof of humanity’s genius, the story has come full circle. In the anime series Code Geass (2006), a totalitarian Britannia conquers Japan and uses robotic weapons called Knightmares to keep the populace in check. Psycho-pass (2012) is set in a dystopian 22nd-century Japan. The book is referenced in post-apocalyptic videogames such as Half-life 2 and Fallout 3.
In an interesting and somewhat hopeful contemporary take authorised by the Orwell estate, Sandra Newman’s Julia (2023) retells the classic from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover. The book gives Julia (who is given no last name in the original) the agency denied to her. It remains faithful to the bleak world Orwell created. But seen through Julia’s livelier, ironic eyes, it is a tiny bit brighter, with a little light already leaking into the totalitarian darkness.
“We are the dead,” Smith says, echoing a line in the original.
“We’re