Gorram it, 1984 does not have a happy ending

… it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

THE END

You know about Big Brother – not the reality TV show, the world leader who infused his regime with the principles “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.”

In George Orwell’s prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is a guy who works for the Ministry of Truth changing the news. If a certain public figure has fallen out of favor with The Powers That Be, Winston is one of the clerks who goes into past editions of the newspaper and changes anything that might tend to show that figure in a positive life. If he has become an “unperson,” the figure is removed from the public record entirely.

(I always thought that was a little unrealistic – surely someone, somewhere, would still have a copy of the old newspapers with the original record. Or later, surely someone, somewhere would have preserved the original record on his hard drive. But as we move our information farther and farther onto a paperless cloud, the idea of being able to manipulate all past records seems more feasible.)

Winston has a small problem of conscience: He remembers. He knows that the unpersons once existed. He recalls that even though today the government is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia, there was a time when we were at war with Eastasia and had always been at war with Eastasia.

He begins to notice that people are miserable, he sees that life is pretty dreary with Big Brother Watching You all the time, and he begins to believe that freedom would be better served if Big Brother is overthrown. But he also knows that citizens are being tortured and killed for believing that – or at least he is able to make a correlation between their beliefs and their eventual disappearance.

By the end of the book, Winston has come to the realization that he was wrong, that Big Brother really has a benevolent spirit and Big Brother really will take care of him for the rest of his life.

Just one tiny problem.

Are you ready for a little revolution?

It's only a matter of days before the novel The Imaginary Revolution will be published. I have prepared a sampling of chapters from the novel to whet your appetite for the real thing.

The story of how Sirius 4 threw off its shackles will be available for public consumption starting Dec. 15, 2012 – Bill of Rights Day – in both ebook form and a handsome, hardcover print edition. This is your opportunity to get a taste of it so you can decide whether to put it on your Christmas list.

The link below (click on the colorful green button with the blue whale) will lead you to a place where you can download a .zip file containing the Imaginary Revolution sampler in .pdf, .epub and .mobi forms. Enjoy! And consider coming back on Dec. 15.


Click here to download your free sampler of chapters from the novel The Imaginary Revolution, scheduled for release on Dec. 15, 2012.