Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) is set in the world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (now out of copyright), and takes place five years after Winston Smith’s interrogation, torture and indoctrination at the hands of the Thought Police. The story opens with Smith drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Café, and watching a news program about Number One (the leader of the enemy state Eastasia). Then he recognises a man sitting behind him, and realises it is Syme, who previously worked with Smith in the Research Department until Syme was unpersonned, disappeared. Syme begins talking to Smith, and tells him that he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in Shetland but was released early.
During the pair’s subsequent conversation Smith finds out that Syme is going back to his old job (Syme notes his ex-colleagues are still working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary), before they are interrupted by events on the screen, which shows Eastasian people protesting against Number One—an unprecedented event. Smith, Syme and the rest of the café’s patrons join in with shouts of “Down with Number One!”, cries similar to those they would normally make during the Two Minute Hate.
After Syme leaves, Smith starts walking home, only to be accosted by the Thought Police and bundled into a car. Sitting in the back is O’Brien, the man who tortured and psychologically broke Smith in Room 101. Smith tells O’Brien to get it over with (Smith expects to be executed, and has done for the last five years) but O’Brien says a worse fate awaits him: Smith subsequently spends several days in a rubber cell withdrawing from his alcohol addiction.
O’Brien then sends for Smith (spoiler):
‘Why have you brought me here?’ Winston asked.
O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose, and looked at Winston with the intense, unspoken sympathy of their first exchanged glance, long ago. It was as if the arrest, the torture, the long interrogation and indoctrination, and the room that Winston could—with some effort—avoid thinking about, had never happened.
‘I am engaged,’ said O’Brien, ‘in a conspiracy to overthrow the rule of the Party in Airstrip One, and hopefully in the whole of Oceania. You have a small but important part to play in this conspiracy. Will you join me?’
Winston’s mug rattled as he put it down. A cold sweat broke from his every pore. It was possible that this was a test of his loyalty. It was also possible that O’Brien—the manipulator, the torturer, the inquisitor, the provocateur—was after all an enemy of the Party! In either case, it was best to play along. If he did not, he was unlikely to leave this place alive. He could always gather what information he was able to, and denounce O’Brien to the Thought Police at the first opportunity. p. 22
In the rest of this long section, O’Brien unveils a conspiracy which involves many of the Thought Police, and he also provides Smith with an account of what life was like under Socialism at the end of the WWII. He then reveals that Smith is one of the Windrush generation (a black immigrant from Jamaica). O’Brien finally adds that there are other people who can remember what it was like at the end of the war, and takes Smith to meet some soldiers.
The last part of the story sees O’Brien and Smith go to an underground shelter where members of the military are in the process of mounting a coup. During the visit a black officer called Haynes gives Smith an account of the various flash points and insurrections in Oceania before the pair ask him to be the Minister of Truth in the new provisional government (“political reasons in the Americas [mean] that at least one of the Ministers in the new [Airstrip One] government should be a Negro.”) Then, during this conversation, there is an attack on the bunker by forces that are still loyal to Oceania. After the shoot-out Haynes is dead, and Syme appears from the smoke as the leader of the rebels who have saved Smith and O’Brien from the loyalist attackers. The revolution succeeds, and Smith then becomes Minister of Truth.
The first half or so of this is quite well done, but the later insertion of contemporary political issues (Windrush, racial strife in America) completely derails any suspension of disbelief, and seems like little more than a facile black-washing of Orwell’s novel (racial conflict is mentioned in the story but is not addressed in any meaningful or significant way).
A game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,000 words. ParSec website.