Jean-Paul Sartre — who was regarded with great suspicion by Orwell — once made a telling point about fictional and science-fictional monsters. What we fear, he said, is a creature of great cunning and energy, quite devoid of any moral or mammalian scruple. This, as he went on to say, is an exact description of our very own species in time of war or scarcity. Thus it is perfect, in its way, that the dehumanized torturers of Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrate their purely human ingenuity by devising the punishment of the rats.
