Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest.

HUBER, Peter [William Safire].

$200.00

Item Number: 143749

New York: The Free Press, 1994.

First edition of this work in which Huber discusses the compelling vision of Orwell’s 1984. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “To Bill Safire Peter Huber.” Also laid in is a letter from The Manhattan Institute to William Safire. The recipient, William Safire, was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Robert Korn.

In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, the telescreen-which spies on its captive audience members and fills their minds with propaganda-is the instrument that makes possible the totalitarian state's absolute control. Huber (Galileo's Revenge) believes Orwell was fundamentally wrong in assuming that electronic media would facilitate mind control. On the contrary, he argues, today's telecommunications world-spanning cable television, personal computer networks, cellular phones and so forth-offers a multiplicity of choices in information and fosters the exchange of ideas. In alternating chapters, Huber splices a belabored critique of Orwell's prophecies with an experimental fiction, closely based on 1984, but with Eric Blair (i.e., Orwell under his real name) as the protagonist. The fictional chapters interpolate real-life figures such as spy Guy Burgess, Orwell's colleague at the BBC, and Vaughan Wilkes, Orwell's sadistic schoolmaster. Concluding with a handy capsule history of telecommunications, Huber provocatively predicts the convergence of computing, television and the telephone in a myriad of mixed-media networks.