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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. For Winston, the world of 1984 is totalitarian: the Party knows all, controls all and misses nothing. To merely think a disloyal thought is to be doomed, because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent Party will sense the thought and mark you for torture and "vaporization."

Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.

Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.

Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

Julia is also perfectly positioned to uncover the vast blank spots in Winston's supposed intellectual curiosity, all the questions he doesn't ask – about her, about the Party, and about the world. I love this trope and used it myself, in Attack Surface, the third "Little Brother" book, which is told from the point of view of Marcus's frenemy Masha:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface

Through Julia, we come to understand the seemingly omniscient, omnipotent Party as fumbling sadists. The Thought Police are like MI5, an Island of Misfit Toys where the paranoid, the stupid, the vicious and the thuggish come together to ruin the lives of thousands, in such a chaotic and pointless manner that their victims find themselves spinning devastatingly clever explanations for their behavior:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

And, as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is a first-rate novel, expertly plotted, with fantastic, nail-biting suspense and many smart turns and clever phrases. Newman is doing Orwell, and, at times, outdoing him. In her hands, Orwell – like Winston – is revealed as a kind of overly credulous romantic who can't believe that anyone as obviously stupid and deranged as the state's representatives could be kicking his ass so very thoroughly.

This was, in many ways, the defining trauma and problem of Orwell's life, from his origin story, in which he is shot through the throat by a fascist: sniper during the Spanish Civil War:

https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html

To his final days, when he developed a foolish crush on a British state spy and tried to impress her by turning his erstwhile comrades in to her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Newman's feminist retelling of Orwell is as much about puncturing the myth of male competence as it is about revealing the inner life, agency, and personhood of swooning love-interests. As someone who loves Orwell – but not unconditionally – I was moved, impressed, and delighted by Julia.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

#pluralistic #reviews #books #orwell #george orwell #nineteen eighty-four #1984 #little brother #fanfic #remix #gift guide #science fiction #sandra newman

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4dbarbie-archive · 4 months ago

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4dbarbie remix: Give up and Be Free

Hello! It's been a while since my last remix. I felt spontaneously inspired to make this based on my most favourite 4dbarbie asks. This one's a bit different as this time I got help from AI so they did a lot of the legwork and I made edits as I saw fit, it definitely cut down on the amount of time it takes to make a remix! I asked them to write it in a conversational tone like a friendly guru talking to me so some of the wording has been changed (which can sometimes be helpful in understanding the message in a new way) so it's not entirely 4dbarbie's words verbatim but the message remains the same (feel free to check out the source texts if you wish!). Hope you enjoy!

Edit: This is based on 4dbarbie's guide to a new identity but you can do it with I AM in mind instead (replacing paragraph 6) for self-realization

My highlight colour key: key concepts are in pink, action points in purple, really important points in red

Source texts: 1, 2, 3, 4 Recommended reading: 1, 2, 3, 4

Welcome, my friend. Let me guide you through something deeply transformative, yet so simple it might surprise you. First and foremost, you need to get to a place within where the person you’re identified with no longer bothers you. As long as you fight it and try so hard & incessantly to change it, you're only giving it further reality. It’s not about force or willpower—it’s more of a surrender, or as I prefer to call it, a giving up. Yes, giving up. Because even if you're not happy about what you see, there is no way around it besides accepting it. Even if this feels like misery at first, accept it. Just sit with it. Only when you no longer fear things staying the same, when you cease caring, does true change begin.

You see, I didn’t fake being unaffected. I simply allowed things to happen to “me”. Painful, pleasant, it didn’t matter. I didn’t try to change anything. I let go of the exhausting loop of desire and fear, like finally putting down a heavy load. The emotions still came, but I didn’t involve myself with them. They didn’t interest me anymore, I became indifferent and neutral to whatever was happening. If I got what I wanted, fine. If I didn’t, fine again. Events passed by like clouds—leaving no imprint, no reverberation. In time, it was like they never existed at all.

And here’s the beautiful part—you’ll begin to toy with this idea: “What if none of this ever really existed in the way I thought?” It’s playful and not serious because you've stopped caring. You’ve stopped chasing “realization”, stopped chasing anything. There's no more trying, no more effort. You no longer want or need anything. And in place of needing nothing, you find something you never expected: power. Not power over things, but power in yourself, in your complete detachment from the world. When you reach this point, everything else becomes secondary.

So how do you walk this path? Start by giving up. Give up the idea that you can control anything. You can do nothing about life but cease caring and let it happen. Do not try to understand anymore; simply be. Let everything be as it is. Let life happen. After all, we all die one day, and it’ll all be over anyway. Why exhaust yourself worrying, fearing, striving or desiring? It’s like fighting an ocean tide—you’re just tiring yourself out. No matter what, you can't force life to give you what you want. Allow everything its being and leave it alone. Instead, step back and let the waves wash over you, let life happen as it happens. Life will flow as it will, and you no longer push or pull at it.

Expect nothing. Not from your body, not from your mind, not from the world. Let them be as they will. If life wants to beat you, just let it beat you. It’s like facing a bully—when you stop reacting, when you stop caring, they lose interest. Sure, maybe they’ll hit harder for a while, but you’ve already surrendered. What more can they do? The same goes for life—stop caring what happens and you’ll find it starts losing its power over you.

Now that you’ve freed yourself from expectations, give yourself everything. Live completely in the moment, forget about a past, don't think about a future. Be here, fully, now. All the good things you used to think about others, think about yourself. In each moment, ask yourself “What if there’s nothing outside of me? What would I think and feel right now?”. Let go of caring what life does with it, just do it. You’re not doing it for some future result; you’re doing it because it feels true to you; to be free and be exactly what you want to be in the moment. Whether tomorrow repeats itself or brings something new, so what? You no longer depend on anything external to feel fulfilled. You keep to yourself and continue thinking what you want, continue being who you want to be. If life follows along, let it. If it doesn’t, let it not. Hold steady to what feels right within you, and allow your thoughts to shape what's real to you.

Finally, remember to forget. The past? Gone. What you see before you? Just a shadow of what was. Now, here’s the key: Want nothing. Do nothing. Don’t chase, don’t seek—just let yourself be. This doesn’t mean you stop living or acting; it simply means you stop the endless striving, the relentless push to try make life bend to your will. Instead, just watch what happens. And most importantly, don’t attach any meaning to it. Be a witness, a quiet observer of the flow of life. Whatever happens, good or bad, is just passing through—you have nothing to do with it. It’s not permanent, nothing is. So why believe in it as though it were immovable? Cease caring and be free!

Let the world dance as it may, but you—remain still within. Watch as the transient nature of everything becomes clearer. You’ll see that the world outside is nothing more than a reflection of the thoughts you no longer hold, and that what you once took to be reality soon ceases to be when you take away your identification.

#remix #4dbarbie #nonduality #non duality #nondualism #non dualism

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