Orwell didn’t say much about Nineteen Eighty-Four, but what he did say, very firmly, was that it was not a prophecy. A satire, a parody and a warning, yes, but not that. As he spelled out in his 1949 statement to Francis A. Henson, “I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe . . . that something resembling it could arrive.” Clearly, it had not.
