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= ORWELL IN ORBIT 2084 =

Dystopia USA

by John Argo

Page 1.

1. 2018 PREFACE TO 2019 BLADE RUNNER YEAR EDITION

There is good reason to re-publish this dystopian SF novel with its jazzy new new title in 2018, given the growing chaos in the USA and around the world today.

I add this preface for three main reasons:

(1) to talk briefly about how this novel foretold the idea of a great wall and other false pieties catering to the street mobs that always run loose in chaotic or revolutionary times. Like George Orwell (1948 1984) homaged in this novel; and to name just a few (see special section at bottom).

(2) Bladerunner Year 2019 is upon us as I write this in December 2018. As we reflected upon the legacy of George Orwell as 1984 arrived, so once again we must reflect upon the classic (my favorite SF) film Blade Runner that saw its initial global release in 1982.

(3) to explain some background relating to my Empire of Time series, because not all readers will be familiar with the series. The series (over a half dozen novels and stories by now) has a lot of interconnecting background tissue in common that may tax the first-time reader's ease of reading. A few words of information up front may help you to read more easily when you're into the story and don't want to stop for research.

1. Surprises in 2008 Dystopia: A Cat Named Donald, a Great Wall, etc.

I was astonished to find these elements in my novel, which compelled me to re-release the novel in December 2018.

During a chance 2018 reading of my novel, I discovered the following elements:

1) USA ruled by a tyrant called the Great Shepherd, corrupt and venal amid fake piety;

2) a wall around the USA, like a vast Berlin Wall with mines, dogs, and troops;

3) an ironic re-take on Ronald Reagan's Berlin speed, "take down this wall;"

4) and, are you ready, a sinister cat named Donald.

2. Blade Runner Year 2019: Dystopia Arrived on Schedule?

Ironically, in a matter of days (as I write this) the year 2019 will begin: Blade Runner Year (BRY), as foreseen by director Ridley Scott in his classic, atmospheric 1982 film Blade Runner.

I originally wrote the story both as a science fiction tale in my Empire of Time series of SF novels, and in protest of the Bush41 regime then in power. SF (science fiction, speculative fiction, subversive fiction, they all spell SF) is the literature of imagination. It has been used for political commentary many times. The original title was The Long War, in parody of Mr. Cheney's imperial euphemism for Bush41's adventures in war and oil (profits).

As the new title suggests, I would add this SF novel to a long shelf of progressive protest and subversive fiction (by definition, all dystopian, social SF of ideas) that includes: Jack London's 1908 The Iron Heel; Aldous Huxley's 1932 Brave New World; Ayn Rand's 1937 Anthem; George Orwell's 1948 novel 1984; Ray Bradbury's 1953 Fahrenheit 451; William Golding's 1954 Lord of the Flies; and many more.

The movie Blade Runner (in all of its iterations by Director Ridley Scott) has long been my personal favorite SF movie of my life, ahead of a baker's dozen including most of the dystopian books & films listed at bottom.

That said, BR is and was a product of a different century, millennium, age. To me, my favorite SF film contains a strong undercurrent of xenophobia, directed at Asians and others not wASP let's say, which must not be part of our world consciousness today. In the early 20th Century, the West is self-destructing with great gusto and talent, as exemplified in the venal and corrupt faces of so many sneaks and demagogues of the corporate-fascist axis swept into power through Reaganism, a belief in the absolute divinity and imperishable goodness of corporations (you know the names, you see the faces, laughing all the way to the bank while destroying what the Enlightenment wrought). We already live in a Grave New World, but most are too delusional to realize it. I do not fear the future, any more or less than I would fear the past, because (predictably) the evolutionary triumph of our DNA is built upon beautiful as well as brutal strengths that never change. As the Sage of my Empire of Time SF novel Lantern Road (Empire of Time) might say in a most Confucian manner: "Earth rains when Heaven weeps because of imbalance in stars and families." The same forces recognized by Aristotle, Machiavelli, and a more modern Willam Golding (let's say) are ever and unceasingly at work, shaping the world and our lives. Only through enlightenment can we ride the horse, master the wind, and better our lives. Bottom line versus xenophobia: all peope everywhere are the same, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, creed, or other tribal markings; and deserve the same justice. Some are great, some are bad, and most are decent. To each, the justice deserved by their actions. Jesus said it (the Golden Rule), as did Buddha and the other great sages who occasionally pass through our world speaking wisdom amid dark, roiling war clouds.

3. About the Empire of Time series as Backdrop to my Novel

Had I intended this as social or political commentary foremost, I might have written a simpler story. As I recall, during the Bush43 regime as a protest, I wanted to write a parody on Orwell's 1984 set in 2084, and that's what I did. Technically, I needed a current-dayish hero to make the story more understandable to contemporary readers in 2008. I already had a long-term series going (Empire of Time) in which time travel agents from the future visit moments in the past to do cautious tweaks of tiny elements. The goal is to fix their disintegrating future a million years upstream without causing contradictions that might spin off new branching worlds without fixing the problem in their time stream. I invented a pretty snazzy method of time travel for this long ago, called the Temporale.

The Temporale is a transit world outside time and space, built upon a medium at the dark matter level (gravitation platelets so tiny they lack all identifiable characteristics of visible matter or energy). The Temporale was built by a long-vanished race of aliens, using that sub-matter as its building blocks. It is encapsulated in a Membrane that is semi-intelligent, self-replicating, and self-policing. The Temporale behaves like a normal world, complete with cities and trains and all that; but it can get you from A to B in our own cosmos (or infinitely many universes) like a wormhole, in a fraction of time, and in apparent violation of the Einstein's cosmic speed limit (light velocity). That's all background, developed over more than half a dozen novels.

To the story: a terrible Time War eons in the future has destroyed part of the space-time fabric of our universe, leaving the future Earth (one big city called City of En, as in the mathematical N that is an infinite number at the end of an interminable sequence of the form 1, 2, 3…N).

Agents from far upstream in the City of En, guided by vast computing systems, find tweaks they may do in the past, which will save the city from falling through the Cosmopause (edge of the expanding universe) and vanish. Two agencies in particular journey back for such tweaks, and they are often violent enemies in the field. The Postal Entity (POSENT) prefers subtle, clean methods very carefully applied. The Transportation Entity (TRANSENT) fields a group of entirely different agents, whose methods are often violent and dramatic (and much more risky for disrupting rather than saving the future). To make things even more complicated, there are other eras and agencies upstream, closer to our own, who work in tandem with (or opposition to) the City of En agents.

Against this backdrop spanning eons, we begin in a desert area outside San Diego in the modern era.

A U.S. Federal agent (Joe Mackinson, DEA) from our own time is hijacked by agents from the far future, who cautiously patrol the corridors of the past to tweak things a bit in order to save their imperiled Earth of a million years from now.

What the City of En agents know, and Mack doesn't, is that his beloved wife Carly is murdered by drug cartels the very night Mack is on stakeout. The deed is done, and nothing can reverse it. But a careful tweak in time may spin off an alternate reality in which (maybe) Mack is reunited with his sweet Carly in their little Talmadge house in an old San Diego neighborhood.

The subtle tradeoffs involve getting Mack to aid their cause, while the time agents do their best to save his wife in return (only if this does not create new perils for the endangered city upsteam).

Mack is asked to undertake a perilous mission in 2084 to escort a political refugee from the U.S.A. to safety in Canada across the Magnum Line (or Great Wall).

First, Mack is essentially kidnapped and taken to Earth 1,000,000 A.D. (the City of N), where he meets two Time Lords (a regal man and woman) who lay out the facts for him in a gloomy though comfortable library orbiting the planet (which is one large city by now).

As Mack considers their deal to rescue a political family in 2084, an enigmatic and unnerving cat named Donald prowls about. I probably added Donald as a bit of decorative fluff, because he is not essential to the plot, but every story needs a pet whether cute or abhorrent.

Mack has only a vague unease about Carly back in 2008, and nobody tells him the truth about the drug-related bloodbath in their cute little Craftsman home set amid night-blooming jasmin, red flowering coral trees, and palms on a cozy little street.

To accomplish the mission, Mack is brainwashed into believing he is a 2084 San Diego local named Kenny Del Sol, who works in a factory and has never married. He is given a hypno code (snap fingers, say Whizzago!) to bring him in and out of control by fellow agents.

One of the complications is that both POSENT and TRANSENT agents are competing in the field, sometimes violently, and Kenny (Mack) is nearly shot at one point.

When the mission is over (with mixed results, but all this was predicted upstream) Mack becomes himself again, and must return to whatever reality awaits him in his native (our) period. He travels back in time, on a time train through the Temporale, accompanied by an enigmatic agent named Beazley, whose motives are never quite clear. And that's why we want to read the story, to find out what happens. I've already gone on longer than I intended to, so now we'll turn the page and step into the story.

4. Special Section: Selected List of Dystopian Literature & Film

H. G. Wells (1895 The Time Machine);
Jack London (1908 The Iron Heel) progressive vision included nature/animal rights activism;
Fritz Lang (1927 German film Metropolis)
Aldous Huxley (1931 Brave New World utopia gone wrong (lost its human soul) becomes dystopia;
Sinclair Lewis (1935 It Can't Happen Here fearing a fascist revolution in the USA like those in some European countries;
Ayn Rand (1937 Anthem warning against loss of individualism in a techno-totalitarian state;
Ray Bradbury (1953 Fahrenheit 451 focuses on book banning and book burning as emblematic of the usual cocktail of demagogues, mobs, and bad ideas causing lost individualism&freedom);
William Golding (1954 Lord of the Flies SF study of how humans naturally degenerate into totalitarian, bully-mob societies led by ruthless, murdering tyrants (compare humanist philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli 1469-1527 The Prince, Discourses on Livy) reflecting upon ancient wisdom of Aristotle, Plato, Polybius et al. and think about the murder of U.S.-Arab journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 and what this says about the condition of world rulers in our day (back to Machiavelli);
Pierre Boulle (1963 Planet of the Apes) made into film ;
Thomas Pynchon (1965 The Crying of Lot 49);
Philip K. Dick (1968 Do Robots Dream of Android Sheep?) made into 1982 classic film Blade Runner by Dir. Ridley Scott;
Ursula K. LeGuin (1971 The Lathe of Heaven);
Joe Haldeman (1975 The Forever War);
Margaret Atwood (1985 The Handmaid's Tale);
Terry Gilliam (1985 U.S. Film Brazil);
William Gibson (1993 Virtual Light and the Sprawl trilogy);
Alex Proyas (1998 English Film Dark City);
Julien LeClerq (2007 French film Chrysalis);
China Mièville (2009 The City and the City);
Paolo Bacigalupi (2009 The Windup Girl);
Hugh Howey (2013 Wool);

NOTE: I threw this list together hurriedly as a representative (not complete nor definitive) list of dystopian writings and films. It's a quick sketch to raise awareness. Many other fine stories & films certainly belong in a more complete listing. My point here is to show some of the major influences leading to Orwell in Orbit 2084: Dystopia USA. As I have indicated on this site, the acronym SF can stand for either Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, or Subversive Fiction. SF is historically a literature of ideas, and constitutes a major portion of any high school or college Literature syllabus, in contrast to the unimaginative who speak (in embarrassment at having enjoyed an exemplar) of "sigh-fie" as if it were some sort of toxic and guilty indulgence. I have spoken at groups about SF being a great part of our human heritage, too often underrated and suppressed (thus, recognizably subversive and humanistic, as great ideas often should be); shocking (and gratifying) willing listeners with the realization that SF elements are to be found in (e.g.) The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and other materials on any proper syllabus.

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