Julia

by Sandra Newman

Tonight’s evening program was one Julia had seen before, about “Our Friend, the Potato.” A tinny male voice informed her that the potato was first discovered by an Airstrip One boy called Walt Raleigh, who’d been beheaded by the capitalists for his pains.

Here the portraits of illustrious Airstrip One virgins—Isaac Newton, Elizabeth Tudor, Alan Turing—stared from the walls, alternating with telescreens.

She especially dwelled on her favorite book, Inner Party Sinners: “My Telescreen Is Broken, Comrade!”

Socialist Purity soap. When a SAZ girl had a vol boyfriend, she called him her Romeo, after the hero of a popular play in which an Inner Party boy eloped with a prole girl. In the play, this led to a general slaughter. The last scene showed the local Party chairman standing in a litter of corpses, bewailing the corrosive effect of sex and the carnage it brought in its wake.