In Competition No. 2554 you were invited to write an extract from George Orwell’s Twenty Eighty.
One or two entrants queried the seemingly odd choice of year. I arrived at this by following Orwell, who chose 1984 by reversing the last two digits of 1948, the year he completed his book on the Isle of Jura. You treated dystopia with fine gallows humour: in John Griffiths-Colby’s world, coffee was king due to everyone being hooked on caffeine; with Katie Mallett the main industry was measuring household rubbish; while Virginia Price Evans’s children were looked after by robots, with parents caught trying to touch them being branded as perverts. The winners, printed below, get £30 each and the extra fiver goes to Alan Millard for his monstrous Large Lady.
Bryony O’Brien (Jnr.), Vice Controller and Grand Mistress of Treblespeak, scrutinised the documents long since retrieved from the memory hole. ‘No doubt saved by some subversive male,’ she sneered. ‘Thank goodness the species is extinct!’ Bryony, who believed in ‘divide and rule’, was intrigued by the notion of devolution. This Blair chap, whoever he was, had clearly gained more power by appearing to devolve a little. So might she if Large Lady, who’d united the great warring powers of the past into the existing, boringly peaceful Globiana, could be persuaded to agree. Determined to try her luck, Bryony approached the monitor and addressed the revered image, whose reaction was immediate.
‘Devolution? Lessons from the past? You imagine the past has anything to teach me?’ screamed Large Lady. ‘Nonsense! To that I have only one thing to say: You learn if you want to. The Lady’s not for learning!’
Alan Millard
Rupert Smith woke up depressed and thumbed the keypad for a packet of Victory Feelgoods, not the most fashionable of cannabis retro-brands but the only ones he would use. They dropped softly into the bedside buybox just as the servo-mechanisms drew his curtains, turned on the pornovid and transmitted a breakfast order to the foodplace. New Ingsoc delivered the goods, for sure. It had faltered and lost its way in the early years of the century, but a few million foreign slaves had made all the difference. Such a simple solution, in the end, once the party had nerved itself. Even so, Rupert thought with sad yearning of the previous century as folklore told it — the drama of endless war, hunger, poverty and fear, circumstances that really tested your mettle, that took you thrillingly beyond the comfort zone. He popped a Feelgood and started to feel better.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Cherietonia, once known as Britain, was now the 77th state of Americasia (which had itself always been at war with Mugabia) and had changed in character very little since 1984, apart from its renaming after the greatest leaders, Big Sister and Big Brother. The ubiquitous CCTV (Community Cherietonivision) showed on one channel a neighbouring garage, with teenage stabbings in the local mall on another. Doublethink had ceased even to be an issue, once the number of A-level students gaining A grades had outstripped the numbers actually sitting the examinations.
The only real difference had been the introduction of Cheriya law, which had replaced all the complicated former systems. The watchword ’Guilt is Innocence’ summed up its rules, which officially disregarded all distracting questions of justice in individual cases, and held that the sole aim of any court case was to make as much money as possible for the lawyers…
Brian Murdoch
Winston tapped his twenty-digit personal security code into the light switch. The room glowed faintly. Relief! no one had broken in, stealing his power. The hamsters began scampering dutifully, generating at least ten minutes’ electricity. Dare he risk a cup of tea? — no: he needed light. If he had both, Eco Police would charge him with squandering resources. The heat generated by his last whipping baked three small loaves, they told him afterwards. Removing the outer of his four coats, he checked for cockroaches. None. Good! — though it meant the flat was too cold, and had been since the Heat Wars of 2061. Julia was due any moment. They would go (together!) to a rare public event, a screening of the classic comedy Global Warming. How deluded those scientists had been! Afterwards she would return with him; together their union would generate enough power — his eyes glazed with lust — to cook some porridge.
D.A. Prince
Big Brother III uploaded the weather forecast from his i-Box. Oh, no. Not another bright cold day. What had happened to the predictions of lush vineyards covering the south end of Inglan? His grandfather had invested heavily in wine when the first predictions had come in. The crash, rather predictable perhaps, had almost wiped him out, at about the same time as the digital revolution had fizzled into failure. Almost all his equipment was malfunctioning, while the proles had made a killing with retro ‘wireless’ sets and bakelite televisions.
One p.m. He shambled to the shaving-mirror. As usual, his eyes followed him round the basin, and he cut himself badly. In the background, the i-Box, trying to make toast, exploded. Damn! Nothing to go with the boiled cabbage. And he had hoped to listen to the Comedy Hour, in which ‘the old days’ were wittily extolled. He loved Winston Smith.
Bill Greenwell
No. 2557: Not QWERTY
You are invited to write a poem or a piece of prose with each line or sentence beginning with the letters A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M in that order. Maximum 16 lines or 160 words. Entries to competition 2557 by 7 August or email jamesy@greenbee.net.
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