Orwell read widely throughout his life: he read H.G.Wells as a schoolboy; in his early days as a struggling writer he wanted to review (among better known authors) "anything by M.P.Shiel"; in a letter he wrote that it was "a positive duty" to read Dr Garnett's Victorian fantasy Twilight of the Gods, and went on to ask whether his correspondent had read J.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds and Guy Boothby's Dr Nikola*1. (Possible Worlds was one of a series of scientific popularisations, by which Orwell might have been impressed and remembered when he came to edit a series himself). And when his name became known, through The Road to Wigan Pier, it was through a book that ended with several chapters on scientific and technical progress and the fiction of H.G.Wells, as Kingsley Amis has pointed out.

In his essay on "Boy's Weeklies" (1939) Orwell showed that he knew the American pulps (which he probably bought in Letchworth Woolworths), regarding them and the new papers of the 'thirties as being of a higher intellectual standard than previous children's reading. It was in that essay as well, that he first contrasted the roles of Verne and Wells in SF history. And before he died he was commenting on the growth of American horror comics, which he insisted should be kept available in his opposition to censorship.

Orwell included popular SF in his reading throughhout his life, and regarded some of it as important (quite apart from the major works I want to discuss later in more detail). When he was an editor for the BBC's Far Eastern service he had scientists such as Haldane, Bernal and C.H.Waddington give talks for him. Now that Orwell's work at the BBC is available it can be seen that he placed heavy emphasis on scientific talks by practicing scientists: he usually had these talks combined into a series on some serious aspect of applied science- malnutrition, soil erosion etc*2.

And in a 1946 letter he listed the things he accepted: "Socialism, Industrialism, the theory of evolution, psycho-therapy, universal compulsory education, radio, aeroplanes"*3. Such a list may seem general, certainly it is not complete, but it indicates Orwell's views of the social consequences of technical and scientific progress: such development in knowledge or organisation (as evolution or industrialism) will have social consequences (eg universal compulsory education). In a study of Orwell's attitude to SF this link becomes very important. But its basis is that Orwell, who is often portrayed as a vague and old-fashioned thinker, not at all scientific, was really the reverse. When he analysed books or world events his analysis was ordered and logical, he had a mind that could recognise the consequences of an event, and rejected other attitudes that could not stand up to this method (eg he rejected all religious belief, and belief in the supernatural). It was in this sense that he criticized not only religious writers (especially when they tried to organise society on religious grounds) but SF authors asw well. It was on this basis that he fell out with H.G.Wells.

Orwell has a direct contact with three authors known for SF work: Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon and H.G.Wells.

Aldous Huxley was his English teacher at Eton during the Great War, and Orwell thereafter maintained an interest in Huxley's social satires and, in Brave New World and in its politics. He was reading Ape and Essence just before his death. Huxley in turn replied to Nineteen Eighty-Four in Brave New World Revisited. They had written distant letters to each other. (Also at Eton Orwell would sometimes have breakfast with the Provost, M.R.James. Despite this the two types of popular fiction Orwell left untouched were Westerns and Horror - Poe excepted).

Orwell's connections with Olaf Stapledon are rarely mentioned. They get a brief footnote in Bernard Crick's biography and another indirect footnote in John Atkin's study. Yet it was Orwell who was responsible for commissioning Beyond the 'Isms' in 1942. This statement of Stapledon's philosophy has been described as "the best introduction for the general reader"*4. The book was published by Secker and Warburg in their Searchlights Books series, edited by Orwell and Tosco Fyvel (who makes no reference at all to Stapledon in his George Orwell: A Personal Memoir). How Orwell came to know Stapledon, or why he decided to add his philosophy to a series of anti-fascist books is not clear. Certainly Orwell was always interested in books of popular scientific theory, and he may have come across First and Last Men when it was republished as a Penguin paperback in 1937 along with books by Sir James Jeans and Julian Huxley. His choice of Stapledon, though, tends to disprove claims of Leslie Fiedler that Stapledon was a sadistic, Stalinist stooge. Orwell had no time for Stalinists and was sometimes almost paranoid about spotting them: if he accepted Stapledon it is pretty certain that Stapledon was okay when Orwell knew him, (Secker and Warburg, whom Orwell had said were known as "the Trotskyist publishers"*5 were unlikely to be sympathetic to a Stalinist), and he gave Stapledon a chance to express himself.

Orwell's best known SF connection and the single SF author on whom he wrote most was H.G.Wells. The father of some of Orwell's childhood friends had met Wells, and the young Eric Blair was given their copy of A Modern Utopia, he admired it so much. At one point in the late 'thirties Orwell and his wife lived in a flat owned by Wells, and Wells sometimes came to dinner. Wells was later approached for a Searchlights book but offered nothing.

Late in life, Orwell wrote that his novel Coming Up For Air was "bound to suggest Wells watered down. I have a great admiration for Wells, ie as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me"*6. Indeed the name that Eric Blair took for his writing alludes to Wells' name. In several places Orwell recorded the importance of Wellsian SF in instigating a spirit of social change in his childhood and youth: "Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G.Wells ... here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined"*7. Several times Orwell contrasted Wells with Jules Verne to Wells' advantage. Orwell insisted that Wells, not Verne, was the father of "scientifiction"*8, with the added benefit of being less anthropocentric. Comparing A Journey to the Moon with the The First Men in the Moon he wrote "Verne's story is scientific, or very nearly so ... Wells's story is pure speculation ... But it creates a universe of its own"*9, and it was this creativity that Orwell so valued. But Orwell recognised that Wells' attitude to change affected more than his SF, and he found that even comedies like Kipps, The History of Mr Polly and The Wheels of Chance were peculiar because of "Wells' belief in Science. He is saying all the time, if only that small shopkeeper could get a scientific outlook, his troubles would be ended"*10. But this attitude raised many problems, moral and otherwise, which Orwell thought Wells could not answer: Wells' belief in progress was actually a limitation of a sort: "(Dickens) would never admit that men are only as good as their technical developments allow them to to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G.Wells, is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like amillstone"*11. A few years later, Orwell took this even further - "Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is there in Nazi Germany"*12. But he did not regard Wells as inherently corrupt, (although he did think Wells was lazy, and wrongly so), instead he regarded Wells as not thinking broadly enough, and not changing his ideas when they needed to change to remain credible. "Wells, Hitler and the World State" was a review of Wells' now-forgotten Guide to the New World (which, like a later work, '42 to '44 also shredded by Orwell, was a collection of journalism and ephemera), and Orwell details the contents as "the usual rigmarole about a World State zzz federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years"*13. It was probably after a meeting between Wells and Orwell, where Wells defended his book and Orwell showed that every point Wells had made was wrong, that Wells wrote to Orwell calling him "You shit"*14. There are other stories about the cause of that letter, though.

And, finally, five years later still, when Orwell read a new edition of The Island of Dr Moreau and still found errors he had pointed to Wells years before, which Wells had admitted existed uncorrected from the first printing, he asked "what writer of Wells's gifts, if he had any power of self criticism or regard for his own reputation, would have poured out in fifty years a total of ninety-five books, quite two thirds of which have already ceased to be readable?"*15. (A question which implies that Orwell had read all of them once and had tried to to do so again).

Orwell also had the chance to learn the effect of Wells' work in real life when he reviewed Hadley Cantril's The Invasion From Mars in 1940, a sociological study of the panic after the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" was broadcast*16.

In the first years of the Second World War, Orwell was working at the BBC, editing the Searchlights Books, and writing rare articles and reviews. Rather strangely, his two principle subjects were poetry and SF; SF particularly dealing with "Prophecies of Fascism". Repeatedly Orwell examined Huxley's Brave New World, Jack London's The Iron Heel, and works by Wells and others. He had referrred to some of these books and the problems they raised in The Road To Wigan Pier, and he was to refer to them again as late as "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" in 1946. At first he was concerned only with the debilitating effects of technological progress - "Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organisation, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organisation, more machines - until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men"*17 but three years later Orwell began to state the need for a social side to technological progress. Brave New World and The Sleeper Wakes, he wrote, "had no relation to the actual future. What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood"*18.

In the essay "Prophecies of Fascism" Orwell examined Jack London's The Iron Heel, pointing out its failures, but also London's ability to see the form and ideology that a repressive governemnt must have: "A ruling class has to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique. London was aware of this, and though he describes the caste of plutocrats who rule the world for seven centuries as inhuman monsters, he does not describe them as idlers or sensualists. they can only maintain their position while they honestly believe that civilisation depends on themselves alone"*19. London was not a pure Marxist so he did not make the errors of most communists: "He knew that economic laws do not operate in the same way as the law of gravity, that they can be held up for long periods by people who, like Hitler, believe in their destiny"*20. This was in contrast to H.G.Wells (although Wells was not a Marxist either) - "London could grasp something that Wells apparantly could not, and that is that hedonistic societies do not endure"*21.

Orwell concluded the essay with an examination of The Secret of the League (1907) by Ernest Bramah (now known only for his Rival of Sherlock Holmes, the blind detective Max Carrados): "The author imagines a labour government coming into office ... Over a period of two years the upper-class conspirators secretly hoard fuel-oil; then suddenly boycott ... the coal industry ... there is vast unemployment and distress ending in civil war, in which (thirty years before General Franco) the upper classes receive foreign aid. After their victory they abolish the trade unions and institute a 'strong' non-parliamentary regime ...

"Why should a decend and kindly writer like Ernest Bramah find the crushing of the proletariat a pleasant vision? It is simply the reaction of a struggling class which felt itself menaced not so much in its economic position as in its code of conduct and way of life"*22.

Orwell wrote little more on SF until "Wells, Hitler and the World State", but he had begun to develop his theories of the psychology of totalitarianism. In a broadcast he said "The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it cannot avoid the changes, which are dictated by needs of power politics"*23, and in "Looking Back on the Spanish War" he began to study the massive falsification of history that the fascists had begun, so that no objective history would be possible. Some of O'Brien's ideas appeared in a 1944 column: "The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truh: it claims to control the past as well as the future*24.

So by 1944, several years before he began to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, all its main themes had been expounded in Orwell's journalism and essays, and in his letters (see for instance the six hundred word letter to an unknwon Mr Willmett*25).

Late in 1945 Orwell managed to borrow a French editon of Zamyatin's We (Nous Autres). His review stated that Huxley must have drawn part of Brave New World from it, but went on to say "It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism - human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is created with divine attributes - that makes Zamyatin's book superior to Huxley's"*26. Some people have claimed that Orwell stole Nineteen Eighty-Four from We but to read Orwell's analysis shows that he apprciated the book partly because it echoed ideas he had already developed: "Zamyatin did not intend the Soviet regime to be the special target of his satire. Writing at about the time of Lenin's death, he cannot have had the Satlin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable. What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country but the implied aims of industrial civilisation"*27, ie the same point that Orwell had made in The Road to Wigan Pier.

Orwell here also made the point, which later academic critics have also made, of treating an SF work as satire (or vice versa). But when he came to one of his last major essays, a 1945 examination of the proto-SF Gulliver's Travels, "Politics vs Literature"*28, he made little study of Swift's satirical intent (especially since, while he referred to contemporary comic satirists, he made no suggestion that Swift's work was ironic or comic), but placed his emphasis on Swift's political background, and how that shaped Gulliver's four voyages. This emphais turned into an analysis of Swift's philosophical logic and his attitude to science. Orwell was not old-fashioned, nor an anti-rationalist; throughtout his last decade he wrote regularly about the consequences of scientific, mechanical and technological development, and wrote at the end of the War an essay, "What is Science", in which he argued that everyone can be scientifically educated, since its does mean being technically trained but taught to think logically. He applied this logical analysis to Gulliver's Travels, and shows that Swift's personal and political background lead to major flaws in his satire on humankind - "In effect we are told that Yahoos are fantastically different from men, and yet are the same. Swift has overreached himself in his fury, and is shouting at his fellow creatures: 'You are filthier than you are!'"*29.

However, this analytical position is not incredibly different from an earlier statement. Immediately following his restatement of the 1937 little fat men's vision ("Barring wars and unforeseen disasters") Orwell pointed out "the huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard. You are at the same moment furiously pressing forward and desparately holding back ... So in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms"*30.

Orwell's criticism was rarely muddled and was 'scientific' in the sense that his arguments were logically based: two contradictory positions could not both be true at the same time. He said that "scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind. It ought to mean acquiring a method- a method that can be used on any problem one meets- and not simply a piling up of a lot of facts"*31 (empahsis in original), and Orwell's work exemplifies the use of this method. Whether he learned anything from Stapledon (a philosophy lecturer at Liverpool University) is unknown, he had come to know A.J.Ayer, the Logical Positivist, though.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was an original work: Orwell found his beliefs and analyses asserted in other works but he did not steal them: he had them before reading those other works. At the same time, when he came to write an SF novel, he was aware of developments in SF, and he was as 'scientific' in his outlook as any other SF author who had then appeared or was appearing in Oceania.

Although he died after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he did not work himself to death to finish it, nor did he think it would be his last: "I have mmy next novel mapped out"*32, he wrote two months before Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Although he was suffering from TB he died when a blood vessel burst in his lung (ie he drowned in his own blood). This was not something that his doctors expected and with a night nurse nearer might have been prevented.

Nineteen Eight-four was Orwell's vision of a possible future but he did not regard it as certain. The publication of the book could help to stave off the possibility, and he regarded work for the prevention of it as a personal responsibility, hence his working while ill, but he had thoughts of other possibilities. The bleakness of Winston Smith's life was not Orwell's bleak view of human life.

Orwell was not a pessimist, (he regarded pessimism as a feature of Conservatives, Fascists and occultists) and from he beginning of the war until his death, he insisted on the need to consider the argments put forward by the pessimists about pain and suffering being necessary and inescapable. Hedonism, Orwell said, had been identified with Socialism, but in theory and practice, hedonism had been shown to fail: when Hitler insisted on austerity, Nazi Germany rose to power, when the Allies fell into a war economy and a better moral position, they too could find the strength to fight. But rejecting Hedonism did not mean rejecting socialism.

Socialism tended to mean the centralisation of power but "collectivism is not inherently democratic, but on the contrary gives to a tyranical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisition never dreamed of" and "every seeming advance towards democracy simply means the coming age of tyranny and privilege a bit nearer"*33, or so it could seem.

These points were expanded in a review of Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave: the pessimist feels "The Beehive State is upon us, the individual will be stamped out of existence, the future is with the holiday camp, the doodlebug and the secret police ... He sees, or thinks he sees, ways in which order and liberty, reason and myth, might be combined, but he does not believe that is the turn civilisation will take.

"This outlook, product of totalitarianism and the perversion of science, is probably gaining ground ... Its error lies in assuming that a collectivist society would destroy human individuality ...

"It does not occur to (Pessimists and Communists) that the so-called collectivist systems existing only try to wipe out the individual because they are not really collectivist and certainly not egalitarian- because, in fact, they are a sham covering a new form of class privilege. If one can see this, one can defy the insect-men with a good conscience"*34.

In that strange, inclusive phrase "holiday camp, the doodlebug and the secret police", a rare voice is heard. The metaphor of an insect-like living of technical inhuman roles and the idea of true individualism reaches forward to as different works as Silverberg's The World Inside and Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see below) but Orwell did not have to distance them, he saw them inherent in contemporary life. SF desccribed what was already threatening.

Orwell, late in his life, offered a mild reproof and refutation of this view - "before writing off our own age as irrevocably damned, is it not worth remembering that Matthew Arnold and Swift and Shakespeare - to carry the story back only three centuries - were all equally certain that they lived in a period of decline"*35.

From The Road to Wigan Pier onwards, Orwell had raised an alternative argument that economics would force a more austere lifestyle on Britain as Britain ceased to be a major world industrial/trading nation. He sometimes tied this to a vision of communities surviving and growing in this fashion. Towards the end of the war discussion of post-war reconstruction encouraged this debate, and Orwell reviewed The Reilly Plan for communal living in 1945*36. This sort of strain was not alien to him and he could be imagined to go and write a better version of The Dispossessed. He never looked at his austere future with any sense of dismay (nor did he welcome it for its own sake) but it was a feature of his writing after 1939.

Some critics have decided that Nineteen Eighty-Four is only a novel about nineteen forty-eight. This can be refuted on a couple of grounds - firstly, that the manuscript shows other dates were used originally, and the year 1948 meant nothing special to Orwell. He had definitely begun planning the book in 1944 or before, while it was published in 1949. Secondly, the minor treatment of time (changes in clocks, dates of events forgotten and unascertainable) in the book ties up with the treatment of time in the earlier Coming Up For Air. George Bowling in that book has flashes of prescience when he sees future events, he also gives major accounts of his past (Time Regained, as it has been called), whose relevance has been pointed out in Amis's New Maps of Hell. Time and memory are reversed from one to the next - they are themes in both.

Orwell had been influenced by political novels such as Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and more baroque thrillers such as John Mair's Never Come Back*37. But in 1939 another novel of English catastrophe had appeared, in which Britain was subject to devastating air attack and social fragmentation (like the London of Orwell's wartime diaries and Nineteen Eighty-four) which Orwell may have read in 1940. In that year he reviewed Neville Shute's next novel, Landfall*38, and announced his intention of looking for Shute's other work. In the phoney war period of literary dearth he may have read Shute's previous novel, the quasi-SF What Happened to the Corbetts, written in 1938 but set after the outbreak of war (described as happening other than it actually came to be). The vision of near-immediate disaster was a characteristic of Orwell's and one that links his last novel to periods before its writing (ie before the war) when he was still physically fit, and not necessarily planning anything like it.

While Orwell's greatest work is limited by SF critics to a sub-school called Utopias and Dystopias it is worth noticing similar works in the genre. Orwell discussed Koestler's The Gladiators, an account of a historical attempt at Utopia, but rejected all of William Morris' works and ideas without mentioning the excellently reasoned, though Utopian, News From Nowhere (written as a reply to Bellamy's Looking Backward). However, the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four (which is O'Brien's Utopia) is a work of scientific analysis illuminated by some esoteric thought (the subjectivity of time, for instance, or the link between sexual energy and politics) on the application of technological breakthroughs to social vents and political control. He had read widely and examined many forms of ideas to achieve this.

In a number of arguments he called on Samuel Butler's satirical dystopia, Erewhon, especially for anti-supernatural arguments, but one can see him directly at work in more general way still making the same point. In 1945 Orwell reviewed C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength (allegedly Lewis' own attack on Wells) and again criticised the use of supernaturalism: "(Mr Lewis) is entitled to his beliefs but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader's sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance"*39. This implies both that literatue should in some way be testable ("probability") and that events in a novel should be stochastic to some degree (not decided in advance by the author's external bias). Both Orwell's Animal Farm and That Hideous Strength are subtitled "A Fairy Story", but Orwell did not allow Lewis to use that as an excuse: Orwell was maintaining the same standard of criticism as he used of major authors. The tone of the review recalls Orwell's consideration of Dickens - "Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels 'Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved'"*40. In other words Orwell was demanding from SF as high a standard as mainstream literature, but in Lewis not finding it.

Orwell wrote about the irrational in modern life because he was concerned to maintain the raional. He asserted the continuity of literature, and the value of the enquiring mind. There was no literature alien to him, and his works show an appreciation of a field that was not then widely regarded. For his most important novel he chose an SF medium, and in turn it showed the value of scientific extrapolation, and the poverty of many works written without Orwell's thought and ability.