by Peter Huber
At first I was just going to write a straight book about the telecommunications revolution -- the superhighway,
the Internet, and all that. Orwell would be just a point of departure, a literary foil. That was what my employer,
the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and my sponsor, the Markle Foundation, were expecting.
I was already a hyper-computerized writer, however. I became instantly absorbed with computers when I entered MIT as a freshman in 1970; my passion for them has grown since. So, as with my prior books, I automatically started by scanning my research materials into my desktop PC. My objective, at first, was just efficient research and retrieval. In short order, I moved thousands of pages of Orwell from paper into the silicon and ferric oxide neurons of my machine.
Then strange things began to happen: I began stumbling across instances of Orwell's self-plagiarism. I would launch a search for a passage I remembered clearly from 1984: my computer would offer up instead a passage from Orwell's classic essay *Politics and the English Language* as an almost verbatim alternative. How far has all this gone, I wondered? Intrigued, I undertook a systematic electronic search across Orwell's writing.
Alone one night in front of my computer, I was struck by a delicious irony. In writing 1984, Orwell has done precisely what Winston Smith is described as doing in the book itself. He had cut and pasted old newspaper columns, articles, and books -- his own -- to create new, politically corrected text, out of old. I immediately wrote a tedious essay documenting what I had found. The essay has been discarded, but the research survives as end-notes to ORWELL'S REVENGE.
I continued writing my non-fiction commentary on the anti-Orwellian consequences of the information revolution. With almost every paragraph I wrote, I found myself returning to Orwell. His elegant prose, his keen insights, his curiosity, and his almost suicidal sense of decency never grew stale.
The further I progressed, the more time I spent reflecting how Orwell could have turned 1984 on its head -- how easily he could have produced the mirror image of his greatest novel, a book of optimism and hope, with the street peddlers in London sweeping aside the Party by embracing the very "telescreen" technology that Orwell thought would enslave them.
Some time in 1992, more by accident than by conscious design -- and because it simply cried out to be done -- I began the job myself. Huber citing Orwell gave way to Huber rewriting him, using electronic scissors, paste, and an electronic library of Orwell's own writings.
Only then did the second great irony hit me. Orwell had expected this to happen. In fact, he had predicted it. In 1984, "all history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." So I was proving that Orwell was wrong by proving that he was right. It was a triumphant act of "doublethink." It was the quintessentially Orwellian crime, a crime of plagiarism, forgery, artistic vandalism, and historic revisionism, a crime committed on and by the telescreen itself.
I would like to think that Orwell himself would be amused by my book. He was, after all, the consummate "doublethinker," the man who always -- always -- saw both sides of everything. If Orwell had lived to the age of eighty-two, as his own father did, he would have died in 1985. A life that long would have allowed him to read history's own letter-to-the-editor in reply. But Orwell died on January 21, 1950, at the age of forty-six. It seemed only right that the sequel to 1984 should be written for him, by a passionate admirer like me, using Orwell's own words, his own genius, to spin new Orwell out of old.
-- Peter Huber, October 9, 1994