***In the ingenious Julia, American author Sandra Newman retells the classic novel from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover***
In 2021, the American novelist Sandra Newman received an irresistible offer from the George Orwell estate. Would she like to write a sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four – told from the perspective of Julia, love interest and comrade in rebellion of Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s 1949 classic?
Since Orwell’s works went out of copyright in the UK in 2021 – and, as Newman points out, “people are re-examining his legacy” in light of the MeToo movement – it seemed inevitable that somebody would produce a feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, with or without the estate’s approval, so “I think they had decided almost that time had run out on not doing it.”
Newman, 57, was a canny choice: several of her novels (The Heavens, The Country of Ice Cream Star, The Men) are set in dystopias, something she puts down to her “inability to live in the world as it is. I keep trying to write a utopia but I can’t quite imagine one that I trust to stay a utopia.”
Newman’s idea – to retell, from Julia’s viewpoint, the events of Nineteen Eighty-Four rather than picking up where the original novel left off – won the approval of Orwell’s 79-year-old son, Richard Blair. “There are all these questions that Orwell sets up and never answers,” says Newman, who set out to plug those gaps. “How Julia gets goods on the black market; her other love affairs – she never says who they were with or how she got away with them, or whether this is considered normal in their world. I wanted to know more about her time writing pornography for the Party: you really want to know what that pornography is like, and Orwell does not tell you.”
Newman is full of admiration for Orwell’s world-building and moral courage, but equally forthright about the less appealing aspects of his novel. “When I first read it, I was p—-d off by the treatment of the Julia character. I think people forget that Winston fantasises about killing her on two occasions.”
Called simply Julia, Newman’s novel is so ingenious, sensitive to the original, and above all witty that one can imagine Orwell thoroughly enjoying it. Inevitably, we follow Julia to the chillingly evoked horror of Room 101, but much of the book is about everyday life, including that of the Proles and others beneath the notice of Big Brother.
For Outer Party workers, the reality of life under a regime in which marriage and unauthorised pregnancy are frowned on (“the portraits of illustrious Airstrip One virgins – Isaac Newton, Elizabeth Tudor, Alan Turing – stared from the walls, alternating with telescreens”) is brought home in harrowing scenes involving abortion.
By putting us inside Julia’s mind, Newman makes the unfolding of her relationship with the sullen, middle-aged Winston more comprehensible than it was in the original. (The development of Julia’s puzzled affection for him is based on Newman’s own feelings for “a guy I had a crush on at the office once”). There is also plenty of detail about Julia’s sex life, and the transgressive nature of the trysts: one lover “liked to fart after sex, loud and long… and say, ‘That to the Inner Party.’”
But Newman isn’t simply offering a corrective to Orwell’s book. “People getting out of North Korea, say, still say it’s uncanny how Nineteen Eighty-Four got it so right,” she notes. “And my book doesn’t contradict anything in his – but it was a political project and there were some aspects of his world he wasn’t that interested in.” For example, one scene in Julia which sees characters in a Ministry canteen tease each other for getting their Newspeak wrong will, Newman thinks, “be familiar to people who’ve been forced to use jargon of any kind, and it worked better than having everybody be traumatised by having to use these terrible Newspeak words”.
Newman lived in the Soviet Union for six months under Gorbachev “just before it fell apart, and I think you’re not giving [people who live in totalitarian regimes] enough respect if you don’t remember that they made jokes about this stuff all the time.”Orwell’s vision may have been inspired by the USSR but the rest of the world has only become more Orwellian in the years since. “It actually is frightening,” says Newman. “We live in a world where if you walk down the street there are screens everywhere that are filming you, in New York at least. We’re living in a Nineteen Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government.”
If this means that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s warning has gone unheeded, do we have to chalk down the book as a failure? “But perhaps it will work now; I do think we need the warning more now than we did then,” argues Newman. “Perhaps it’s something that has persisted and survived all these years to be of use to us now when we need it most.”
One aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four rather too familiar for comfort these days is the idea of writers from the past being cancelled for thoughtcrime. Presented in Anna Funder’s recent book Wifedom as a misogynist who bullied his wife, Orwell (who died in 1950, aged 46, after suffering from tuberculosis) could soon become a candidate for cancellation himself.
“Orwell definitely meant us to think that Winston’s misogyny was a result of sexual repression by the Party,” says Newman. “But there is something over and above that where Orwell isn’t quite inhabiting his female characters, or entirely distant from the misogyny of Winston. It’s a bit mysterious given the rest of his personality: he was a very compassionate person who made a serious attempt to see through his own prejudices.”
In any case, the idea of cancellation is anathema to Newman. “I don’t fully understand those who are judgemental to such a degree that they think somebody should be erased from the book of life posthumously,” she says. “It’s not like we’re giving money to George Orwell and rewarding him for being a misogynist.”
Newman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and lives in New York; I am talking to her in a flat in Hammersmith, west London, where she is staying with her husband, the author Howard Mittelmark. With an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, she is a devoted Anglophile. “I was riding on the train here a couple of nights ago, and I thought: ‘What’s great about this is I do not feel that any of these people want to kill me. And you can’t say that in New York.’” Flatteringly, one thing she admires about Orwell is his “very English common sense”.She identifies “the profound loneliness of my childhood” as the making of her as a writer. She was adopted at 13 days old; her new parents “were strange people” and her mother took her own life when Sandra was 13.
At home, in the years that followed, “I would be on one floor, my father on another and my brother on another; we made our own food. It was like living alone: there was no family. It has felt challenging for me to have a social life – I never got used to having people around – but it means writing is a very natural thing for me to do.”
I wonder what Orwell would have made of the reaction to Newman’s last novel, The Men (2022), which imagined a world in which anyone with a Y chromosome suddenly disappeared; to the displeasure of many on social media, this included trans women as well as men. “It was an over-reaction, but I think Orwell was prone to over-reaction himself so I doubt he would have been horrified.”
Was the backlash inhibiting? “It should be, but when I write books it doesn’t affect me – writing a book you’re really alone, so it’s hard to imagine that other people are going to read it.”
Is it becoming harder to write morally complex books at a time when reactions are so polarised? “Well, the reactions to Nineteen Eighty-Four were pretty polarised,” says Newman. When Nigel Kneale’s TV adaptation starring Peter Cushing was broadcast in 1954, “there were all these calls to the BBC complaining, and some hapless person who happened to be named George Orwell was getting calls all night and I think had to change his phone number. So it’s really nothing new.”
I think those retellings are lazy writing, people use old ideas insetad of coming up with something new. It’s like she wants to use a well known book by someone else to promote herself.
Extension-Ad-2760 on
The comparison of the modern day to a “Nineteen Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government” is very interesting actually. On the one hand, the constant filming and lack of privacy is *very* accurate, and cancelling people is a thing – though the gov doesn’t do it.
On the other hand, being able to choose the gov is a ridiculously massive difference, and information is *really* hard to censor in Western society. That seems to me to be too big a difference from 1984 to ignore. The internet would break the party if it existed in Winston’s world.
JoyfulNoise1964 on
Brave New world did though
toblotron on
“Rewriting” 1984, to make it argue for different political opinions than the original did? That sounds very 1984 😉
intheeventthat on
I was ready to hate this, (I’m a woman, but I’m fine with 1984 not being a feminist novel, and the protagonist being flawed), but having read the article I have to say I might be interested in reading it. I just hope the opressive totalitarian society feel is kept, just explored from Julia’s angle.
The original novel did a great job of bringing someone who doesn’t know what living in a totalitarian society is like into that world. I’d hate if this book lost that by trying to pay too much attention to…current trends.
mankytoes on
Sounds interesting, I might give it a look. Always loved Julia’s character.
Orwell had sympathy with women, but he was certainly a man of his time. There’s a great passage in Road to Wigan Pier I remember where he says how the men, if unemployed, never help with housework or child rearing, they’ll just sit there all day while their wives work their arses off. But we shouldn’t expect them to, because being unemployed is emasculating enough without expecting them to do women’s work…
thamfgoat69 on
Huxley was more accurate in his predictions
macadamnut on
The Telegraph would have done just fine under IngSoc.
mindlance on
Alan Moore’s ‘The Black Dossier’ contains an amusing example of what such pornography might be like.
LeglessYak0 on
Orwell did tell us about the porn:
> There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like ‘Spanking Stories’ or ‘One Night in a Girls’ School’, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
> ‘What are these books like?’ said Winston curiously.
> ‘Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary, dear–not even enough for that.’
MllePerso on
Honestly, I’m getting sick of all these retread novels. Fairy tale, but it’s YA feminist romance! Shakespeare, but it’s a murder mystery thriller! Orwell, Fitzgerald or any other classic author, but from the perspective of a side character whose views just happen to match up with those of a modern person with socially acceptable politics! Smacks of marketing ploys by cowardly editors more than anything else. Please, please, please get your own ideas.
tony1grendel on
I’d read it. I remember reading 1984 as a teen and thinking gosh, I wish I had a girlfriend like Julia
MarsNirgal on
>[..]Newman’s last novel, The Men (2022), which imagined a world in which anyone with a Y chromosome suddenly disappeared; to the displeasure of many on social media, this included trans women as well as men.
Oh, that was her. I remember all that mess. Hope this one is at least better.
finalmattasy on
I think 1984 does mention pornography as a measure to control masses. Prostitution is illegal, porn is used.. iirk.
lemon_girl223 on
Isn’t she the one who wrote the wildly simplistic and transphobic novel “The Men”?
Burning_Flags on
“Do I have to do everything?” -Orwell
TheCloudFestival on
It’s the same for every Torygraph editorial; The author knows nothing about the subject but has very strong opinions of it regardless.
hawkshaw1024 on
A “retelling” of 1984 seems like an amazingly pointless thing to write, but go off I guess.
giganticsquid on
I wonder if the US government will promote the re-write like they did the original.
Teafairy6767 on
Ngl, I’m SO bored of literally EVERYTHING getting an extended universe.
Number-Thirteen on
Not only did he mention the porn as another user posted, Big Brother was attempting to eliminate the orgasm so that the sex drive would be non-existent. The world where porn was everywhere to over-stimulate people was Huxley’s Brave New World, sort of the opposite of Orwell’s 1984. Instead of everyone being controlled, everyone was free and every vice was commonplace so people would be unconcerned about real issues.
Geezersteez on
Say what? Rewriting 1984?
How very 1984!
ExpandThineHorizons on
So we’re doing spinoffs of novels now? Like movies with untold minute details being spun off into unnecessary full-length movies, we need to take unexplained details in books and spin them off too?
SectorEducational460 on
Did he have to explain it. It was meant to give you a limited understanding that porn existed, and even then limited. How it was put in the black market was left to the readers imagination. It wasn’t supposed to be rigid and set by the world’s lore. It was to be inferred by the reader.
fake_zack on
Julia is a pretty terrible name for a retelling of 1984, even if it is from Julia’s perspective.
Regular_Letterhead51 on
but why?
majshady on
Anything rather than come up with a new idea, also anyone who has read more than one book knows control through pleasure is delt with better in Huxley’s Brave New World. Making whatever this is doubly redundant
BVerfG on
A feminist take on 1984…the title could just as well be “moneygrabbing in the#metoo era”. Yes, we all needed a feminist take on 1984 because why not defile every classic with some rewrite for greedy fucking authors and bookcorps.
colglover on
This trend feels like it started with “hey let’s have beach read authors rewrite Greek myths in more feminist ways, that’ll be both cute and sell copies” and like, sure, I’m on board for that because those stories are literally ancient and were part of an oral storytelling tradition where reinterpretations were a part of each tellings’ special sauce.
But uh, rewriting books that are less than 100 years dead….ehhhhh. That smacks of the ghostwriter who can’t plot for themselves, more than it does a scholar attempting a deeply researched interrogation.
This reminds me quite a bit of the discourse around Foundation, which has been “adapted” into a show that really bears no resemblance to the original work but which has been praised for having more modern identity politics. We can argue about the two works on their relative merits, but the point remains that naming them the same thing results in a ton of confusion, not least about what message we are trying to send future generations. “Progress” would seem to imply a need to acknowledge the past and move forward from it to a better place; what our social politics seem obsessed with instead is obfuscating the past by burying it in low-effort popcorn entertainment.
ryan_recluse on
Because the author isn’t obligated to exhaustively detail every aspect of the world building. Especially when those elements are tangential to the concepts he was interested in exploring.
And it’s even less relevant at the end of the day because as Huxley noted in his letter to Orwell, the world isn’t going to become 1984, it’ll be Brave New World.
BiznessCasual on
Yet another area where Orwell got outclassed by Huxley.
32 Comments
***In the ingenious Julia, American author Sandra Newman retells the classic novel from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover***
In 2021, the American novelist Sandra Newman received an irresistible offer from the George Orwell estate. Would she like to write a sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four – told from the perspective of Julia, love interest and comrade in rebellion of Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s 1949 classic?
Since Orwell’s works went out of copyright in the UK in 2021 – and, as Newman points out, “people are re-examining his legacy” in light of the MeToo movement – it seemed inevitable that somebody would produce a feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, with or without the estate’s approval, so “I think they had decided almost that time had run out on not doing it.”
Newman, 57, was a canny choice: several of her novels (The Heavens, The Country of Ice Cream Star, The Men) are set in dystopias, something she puts down to her “inability to live in the world as it is. I keep trying to write a utopia but I can’t quite imagine one that I trust to stay a utopia.”
Newman’s idea – to retell, from Julia’s viewpoint, the events of Nineteen Eighty-Four rather than picking up where the original novel left off – won the approval of Orwell’s 79-year-old son, Richard Blair. “There are all these questions that Orwell sets up and never answers,” says Newman, who set out to plug those gaps. “How Julia gets goods on the black market; her other love affairs – she never says who they were with or how she got away with them, or whether this is considered normal in their world. I wanted to know more about her time writing pornography for the Party: you really want to know what that pornography is like, and Orwell does not tell you.”
Newman is full of admiration for Orwell’s world-building and moral courage, but equally forthright about the less appealing aspects of his novel. “When I first read it, I was p—-d off by the treatment of the Julia character. I think people forget that Winston fantasises about killing her on two occasions.”
Called simply Julia, Newman’s novel is so ingenious, sensitive to the original, and above all witty that one can imagine Orwell thoroughly enjoying it. Inevitably, we follow Julia to the chillingly evoked horror of Room 101, but much of the book is about everyday life, including that of the Proles and others beneath the notice of Big Brother.
For Outer Party workers, the reality of life under a regime in which marriage and unauthorised pregnancy are frowned on (“the portraits of illustrious Airstrip One virgins – Isaac Newton, Elizabeth Tudor, Alan Turing – stared from the walls, alternating with telescreens”) is brought home in harrowing scenes involving abortion.
By putting us inside Julia’s mind, Newman makes the unfolding of her relationship with the sullen, middle-aged Winston more comprehensible than it was in the original. (The development of Julia’s puzzled affection for him is based on Newman’s own feelings for “a guy I had a crush on at the office once”). There is also plenty of detail about Julia’s sex life, and the transgressive nature of the trysts: one lover “liked to fart after sex, loud and long… and say, ‘That to the Inner Party.’”
But Newman isn’t simply offering a corrective to Orwell’s book. “People getting out of North Korea, say, still say it’s uncanny how Nineteen Eighty-Four got it so right,” she notes. “And my book doesn’t contradict anything in his – but it was a political project and there were some aspects of his world he wasn’t that interested in.” For example, one scene in Julia which sees characters in a Ministry canteen tease each other for getting their Newspeak wrong will, Newman thinks, “be familiar to people who’ve been forced to use jargon of any kind, and it worked better than having everybody be traumatised by having to use these terrible Newspeak words”.
Newman lived in the Soviet Union for six months under Gorbachev “just before it fell apart, and I think you’re not giving [people who live in totalitarian regimes] enough respect if you don’t remember that they made jokes about this stuff all the time.”Orwell’s vision may have been inspired by the USSR but the rest of the world has only become more Orwellian in the years since. “It actually is frightening,” says Newman. “We live in a world where if you walk down the street there are screens everywhere that are filming you, in New York at least. We’re living in a Nineteen Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government.”
If this means that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s warning has gone unheeded, do we have to chalk down the book as a failure? “But perhaps it will work now; I do think we need the warning more now than we did then,” argues Newman. “Perhaps it’s something that has persisted and survived all these years to be of use to us now when we need it most.”
One aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four rather too familiar for comfort these days is the idea of writers from the past being cancelled for thoughtcrime. Presented in Anna Funder’s recent book Wifedom as a misogynist who bullied his wife, Orwell (who died in 1950, aged 46, after suffering from tuberculosis) could soon become a candidate for cancellation himself.
“Orwell definitely meant us to think that Winston’s misogyny was a result of sexual repression by the Party,” says Newman. “But there is something over and above that where Orwell isn’t quite inhabiting his female characters, or entirely distant from the misogyny of Winston. It’s a bit mysterious given the rest of his personality: he was a very compassionate person who made a serious attempt to see through his own prejudices.”
In any case, the idea of cancellation is anathema to Newman. “I don’t fully understand those who are judgemental to such a degree that they think somebody should be erased from the book of life posthumously,” she says. “It’s not like we’re giving money to George Orwell and rewarding him for being a misogynist.”
Newman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and lives in New York; I am talking to her in a flat in Hammersmith, west London, where she is staying with her husband, the author Howard Mittelmark. With an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, she is a devoted Anglophile. “I was riding on the train here a couple of nights ago, and I thought: ‘What’s great about this is I do not feel that any of these people want to kill me. And you can’t say that in New York.’” Flatteringly, one thing she admires about Orwell is his “very English common sense”.She identifies “the profound loneliness of my childhood” as the making of her as a writer. She was adopted at 13 days old; her new parents “were strange people” and her mother took her own life when Sandra was 13.
At home, in the years that followed, “I would be on one floor, my father on another and my brother on another; we made our own food. It was like living alone: there was no family. It has felt challenging for me to have a social life – I never got used to having people around – but it means writing is a very natural thing for me to do.”
I wonder what Orwell would have made of the reaction to Newman’s last novel, The Men (2022), which imagined a world in which anyone with a Y chromosome suddenly disappeared; to the displeasure of many on social media, this included trans women as well as men. “It was an over-reaction, but I think Orwell was prone to over-reaction himself so I doubt he would have been horrified.”
Was the backlash inhibiting? “It should be, but when I write books it doesn’t affect me – writing a book you’re really alone, so it’s hard to imagine that other people are going to read it.”
Is it becoming harder to write morally complex books at a time when reactions are so polarised? “Well, the reactions to Nineteen Eighty-Four were pretty polarised,” says Newman. When Nigel Kneale’s TV adaptation starring Peter Cushing was broadcast in 1954, “there were all these calls to the BBC complaining, and some hapless person who happened to be named George Orwell was getting calls all night and I think had to change his phone number. So it’s really nothing new.”
**Read Jake Kerridge’s piece for free:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sandra-newman-george-orwell-julia-1984/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sandra-newman-george-orwell-julia-1984/)
I think those retellings are lazy writing, people use old ideas insetad of coming up with something new. It’s like she wants to use a well known book by someone else to promote herself.
The comparison of the modern day to a “Nineteen Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government” is very interesting actually. On the one hand, the constant filming and lack of privacy is *very* accurate, and cancelling people is a thing – though the gov doesn’t do it.
On the other hand, being able to choose the gov is a ridiculously massive difference, and information is *really* hard to censor in Western society. That seems to me to be too big a difference from 1984 to ignore. The internet would break the party if it existed in Winston’s world.
Brave New world did though
“Rewriting” 1984, to make it argue for different political opinions than the original did? That sounds very 1984 😉
I was ready to hate this, (I’m a woman, but I’m fine with 1984 not being a feminist novel, and the protagonist being flawed), but having read the article I have to say I might be interested in reading it. I just hope the opressive totalitarian society feel is kept, just explored from Julia’s angle.
The original novel did a great job of bringing someone who doesn’t know what living in a totalitarian society is like into that world. I’d hate if this book lost that by trying to pay too much attention to…current trends.
Sounds interesting, I might give it a look. Always loved Julia’s character.
Orwell had sympathy with women, but he was certainly a man of his time. There’s a great passage in Road to Wigan Pier I remember where he says how the men, if unemployed, never help with housework or child rearing, they’ll just sit there all day while their wives work their arses off. But we shouldn’t expect them to, because being unemployed is emasculating enough without expecting them to do women’s work…
Huxley was more accurate in his predictions
The Telegraph would have done just fine under IngSoc.
Alan Moore’s ‘The Black Dossier’ contains an amusing example of what such pornography might be like.
Orwell did tell us about the porn:
> There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like ‘Spanking Stories’ or ‘One Night in a Girls’ School’, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
> ‘What are these books like?’ said Winston curiously.
> ‘Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary, dear–not even enough for that.’
Honestly, I’m getting sick of all these retread novels. Fairy tale, but it’s YA feminist romance! Shakespeare, but it’s a murder mystery thriller! Orwell, Fitzgerald or any other classic author, but from the perspective of a side character whose views just happen to match up with those of a modern person with socially acceptable politics! Smacks of marketing ploys by cowardly editors more than anything else. Please, please, please get your own ideas.
I’d read it. I remember reading 1984 as a teen and thinking gosh, I wish I had a girlfriend like Julia
>[..]Newman’s last novel, The Men (2022), which imagined a world in which anyone with a Y chromosome suddenly disappeared; to the displeasure of many on social media, this included trans women as well as men.
Oh, that was her. I remember all that mess. Hope this one is at least better.
I think 1984 does mention pornography as a measure to control masses. Prostitution is illegal, porn is used.. iirk.
Isn’t she the one who wrote the wildly simplistic and transphobic novel “The Men”?
“Do I have to do everything?” -Orwell
It’s the same for every Torygraph editorial; The author knows nothing about the subject but has very strong opinions of it regardless.
A “retelling” of 1984 seems like an amazingly pointless thing to write, but go off I guess.
I wonder if the US government will promote the re-write like they did the original.
Ngl, I’m SO bored of literally EVERYTHING getting an extended universe.
Not only did he mention the porn as another user posted, Big Brother was attempting to eliminate the orgasm so that the sex drive would be non-existent. The world where porn was everywhere to over-stimulate people was Huxley’s Brave New World, sort of the opposite of Orwell’s 1984. Instead of everyone being controlled, everyone was free and every vice was commonplace so people would be unconcerned about real issues.
Say what? Rewriting 1984?
How very 1984!
So we’re doing spinoffs of novels now? Like movies with untold minute details being spun off into unnecessary full-length movies, we need to take unexplained details in books and spin them off too?
Did he have to explain it. It was meant to give you a limited understanding that porn existed, and even then limited. How it was put in the black market was left to the readers imagination. It wasn’t supposed to be rigid and set by the world’s lore. It was to be inferred by the reader.
Julia is a pretty terrible name for a retelling of 1984, even if it is from Julia’s perspective.
but why?
Anything rather than come up with a new idea, also anyone who has read more than one book knows control through pleasure is delt with better in Huxley’s Brave New World. Making whatever this is doubly redundant
A feminist take on 1984…the title could just as well be “moneygrabbing in the#metoo era”. Yes, we all needed a feminist take on 1984 because why not defile every classic with some rewrite for greedy fucking authors and bookcorps.
This trend feels like it started with “hey let’s have beach read authors rewrite Greek myths in more feminist ways, that’ll be both cute and sell copies” and like, sure, I’m on board for that because those stories are literally ancient and were part of an oral storytelling tradition where reinterpretations were a part of each tellings’ special sauce.
But uh, rewriting books that are less than 100 years dead….ehhhhh. That smacks of the ghostwriter who can’t plot for themselves, more than it does a scholar attempting a deeply researched interrogation.
This reminds me quite a bit of the discourse around Foundation, which has been “adapted” into a show that really bears no resemblance to the original work but which has been praised for having more modern identity politics. We can argue about the two works on their relative merits, but the point remains that naming them the same thing results in a ton of confusion, not least about what message we are trying to send future generations. “Progress” would seem to imply a need to acknowledge the past and move forward from it to a better place; what our social politics seem obsessed with instead is obfuscating the past by burying it in low-effort popcorn entertainment.
Because the author isn’t obligated to exhaustively detail every aspect of the world building. Especially when those elements are tangential to the concepts he was interested in exploring.
And it’s even less relevant at the end of the day because as Huxley noted in his letter to Orwell, the world isn’t going to become 1984, it’ll be Brave New World.
Yet another area where Orwell got outclassed by Huxley.