The first chapter of Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four has a
fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith’s love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her “mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines”:
That line just
kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:
She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the
1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.
I first read
1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I’d gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It’s no coincidence that I wrote a series of “Little Brother” novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:
I didn’t stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with “Anda’s Game” (“Ender’s Game”):
Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can’t get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay “Genesis,” the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:
As my “famous title” stories and
Little Brother books show, this work needn’t be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions (“fair use” in the US, “fair dealing” in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns
The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall’s 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell’s heirs tried to censor the book:
In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had “fully employed those conscripted elements from
Gone With the Wind to make war against it.” Randall used several of Mitchell’s most famous lines, “but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance”:
The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman’s wonderful novel
Julia, which retells
1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:
Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both
Wind Done gone and
Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author’s throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.
For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a “native” of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his “oldthink” baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she’s a naive “girl,” who “doesn’t much care for reading,” and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.
ALT