ORWELL, George

   Pseudonym of UK writer Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), much of whose best work was contained in his impassioned journalism and essays, assembled in the 4 vols of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (all coll 1968). His fiction and extended social criticism, as inDown and Out in Paris and London (1933), also demonstrates his good sense and the intense clarity of his mind. His books of sf interest are two. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945 chap) is a fable satirical of the formcommunism took once it had established itself in the Soviet Union, and consequently enraged many of those who responded sensitively to criticisms of what they continued to perceive as a valid experiment in socialism. Despite its fable form, however, Animal Farm is an intensely practicalbook, mocking not the ideals of socialism or communism (many of which GO shared) but their corrupt embodiment in an actual state. The attack is direct, and the USSR is the target. A great revolution takes place on the Farm, but is soon subverted by the Pigs, whose leader, Napoleon, seizespower and reduces the Revolution's original 7 Commandments (the last being "All animals are equal") down to one, which is written in capitals on thecommunal wall: All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others. The attack on Stalin is devastating. A cartoon feature film animated byJohn Halas and Joy Batchelor, Animal Farm, was released in 1955.GO's most famous book remains NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which was published shortly before his death of tuberculosis and which again caused some of his colleagues on the Left to accuse him (mistakenly) of betrayal. It was filmed in 1955 as 1984 and in 1984 as NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. With Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), it is the century's most famousEnglish-language DYSTOPIA. It is a book of hectic, devilish, claustrophobic intensity, so nightmarish in the telling that some critics have faulted it (imperceptively) for subjective imbalance. In 1984, the world is divided into three vast enclaves: Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is devastatingly shabby - never having been decently rebuilt after anatomic war fought in the 1950s - and without hope. It is hard to resist a sense that GO was painting, with an unusual savagery of verisimilitude, the UK in which he lived - 1984 being simply a partial inversion of 1948 - but his presentation of the totalitarian regime ruling Airstrip One could be thought to apply to the contemporary Labour government of the UK only by those whose POLITICS were radically to the right of GO's own. The rulers of Airstrip One (symbolized by images of Big Brother) use their ability to inflict pain to drive the fact of their power into the masses, whose lives are mercilessly regimented by the Thought Police and who live in squalid barracks monitored by two-way tvs, their thoughts controlled by the Newspeak to which GO devoted a scathing appendix: "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought . . . should be literally unthinkable." The scarifying story of Winston Smith's attempt to liberate himself, and of his eventual surrender of all his human dignity under torture, makes up the actual plot of the book. As an indictment of the deep tendency of modern, technologically sophisticated governments to manage reality, and as a further devastating assault upon the actual situation in the USSR of 1948, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was unmatched. Its pessimism was bothdistressing and salutary. Its understanding of the nightmare of power - when wielded by representatives of a species which had evolved beyond the constraints of mercy - was definitive. "Do not forget this," his chief torturer tells Winston at the finish, after glorying in the end of all natural human affinities and goals: "Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler . . . If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."

   JC

   About the author: There is much Orwell criticism in print. Irving Howe's Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1963) is valuable, as are George Woodcock's The Crystal Spirit (1967) and George Orwell: A Reassessment (anth 1988) ed Peter Buitenhuis and Ira B. Nadel.

   See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUSIC; POLAND; PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY; THEATRE.