THE YEAR IS 198X

Barley, a dog, stands on a hill in front of a sign reading, “Make Orwell fiction again.”

If I’m being honest, I’m consistently frustrated by people who see fiction as a sort of “fun aquarium” for problematic ideas. As if, somehow, producing fiction is an act of exorcism, a thing that banishes what we dislike to the Fiction Realm by bathing it in literary sunlight. Such people tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that, for example, Orwell’s writing is no more or less fictional than it was at the time it was published, and that literary works that have staying power do so not because they are containment zones, but because they are mirrors.