Thirty-five years before it came to pass, George Orwell’s foretelling of 1984 was as a dystopian horror story; Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101 and all that. In reality, the actual 1984 rolled around minus the all-powerful totalitarian Party of Orwell’s nightmares – although a couple of formidable and divisive leaders – Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – were both well into the process of bluntly reshaping Britain and the US respectively to fit their free-market, get-rich-quick dogma.
What Orwell could have set out as far back as 1949 was a prospectus for pop culture in 1984. He put the words into the mouth of one of his lead characters, O’Brien, the scheming Party official. “Our only true life is in the future,” O’Brien tells the doomed Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “But how far away that future may be there is no knowing.”
