Orwell 2020 is a dark comedy about the 2020 lockdown and the 2021 vaccine roll out. As the title suggests, the novel revises Orwell’s story of totalitarian oppression so that it ends happily. My goal is to break the spell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which starts low and descends even lower, with the hero Winston giving in to Doublethink.
Orwell didn’t have faith that the “proles” could understand what’s happening. I do.
My first inspiration to write this story came in early 2020 with the Danser Encore protests in the Paris train stations, where people took off their masks, forgot about social distancing rules, and starting singing and dancing. That defiantly joyful display presented a stark contrast to popular dance videos of the medical professionals, automatons doing absurd clockwork dances, which was so symbolic of the mass formation psychosis that was erupting around the globe. I wrote a short story called “C0VlD-1984, The Musical,“ which is now Chapter 2 of this novel.
Orwell 2020 is written for those who can appreciate the gallows humor of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Admirers of E. L. Doctrow’s Ragtime will hear echoes of his descriptions of J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford in my descriptions of our modern day equivalents, Klaus Schwab and Elon Musk.
This novel is a sequel to my last novel, Locus Amoenus, which retells the story of Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. The narrator/memoirist sees parallels between real life and classic narratives and relates his story accordingly.
Emmy-award winning actor Ben Jorgensen, who read the Locus Amoenus audiobook, was suicided by the lockdowns. Orwell 2020 is dedicated to him.
Orwell 2020 is represented by Eric Miller with 3iBooks. Interested publishers please write to eric (at) 3iBooks.com
Pre-Publication Media about the Novel
Reading & Interview The Strange Recital podcast featured up-and-coming actor Charlie Besso reading an excerpt from the novel. Hosts Brent Robison and Tom Newton interview me after the reading.
Novelist/investigative reporter Biff Thuringer aka Steve Hopkins covered the breaking news when I announced I was starting to write CoVid-1984, the Musical.
Off-Guardian article mentioning Co\/1D-I984, The Musical Goes Viral
I wrote an article for the Off-Guardian about how much more effective fiction, and especially literary fiction, can be for getting through to brainwashed people. That article was picked up by dozens of other alternative news outlets and translated into several different languages. I also mentioned the prequel to C0ViD-1984, The Musical. As a result of this publicity, hundreds of people in Europe and the US downloaded the Locus Amoenus audiobook from my websites. Proceeds went to the Ben Jorgensen fund at Dactyl Foundation. 
Live Interview with CIC in Berlin
In late 2022, I was a guest on the Corona Investigative Committee podcast with Viviane Fischer and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg. As a philosopher of science, I critique the World Economic Forum’s transhumanist agenda, which is one of the themes of the novel. At 49:00 – 53:13, I talk a bit about writing C0ViD-1984, The Musical.
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A Long Synopsis (contains spoilers)
The story opens as Winston arrives at the hospital too late to save his mother, who had only a mild case of CoVid-19 but was put on remdesivir and intubated. Winston is beaten and tasered by security guards for not wearing a mask and he is passed out on a gurney as his mother dies.
Weeks later, amid the BLM protests in NYC, where building are plastered over with “Big Pharma is Watching You” posters, Winston goes to work at the Public Library digitizing Percy Shelley’s manuscripts for Octopus Books. Shelley is known for the line, “Ye are many; they are few” that inspired the peaceful civil disobedience of Thoreau, Gandhi and MLK.
At the library, Winston works with Syme whose job it is to use AI to reduce all poetic literature to mono-vocal summaries, fixing their meanings once and for all. Winston starts a romance with Julia, a feminist curator and transhumanist literature specialist at the library. Julia is an expert on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and she is tapped by Koenig Schmidt, author of The Great Reboot, to co-author his latest book on his transhumanist agenda called Eusocial Capitalism, which is a nod to Orwell’s book within his novel, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. (Sidenote: Orwell was parodying John Burnham’s book The Managerial Revolution; Burnham was Kissinger’s mentor, and Kissinger was Klaus Schwab’s mentor. My book within the book parodies Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution.)
Julia is also invited to become a Global Economic Club “Young Leader,” and she accepts, planning to sabotage the organization from within.
Winston, Julia, and her five-year-old daughter Honoré move to Winston’s farm in the Harlem Valley of NY. Winston joins a socially awkward local group of medical freedom fighters, called the Lawn Chairs, who organize protests at PTA meetings and set up a fake vaccine card service.
At a farm co-op, Winston meets billionaire Fedir O’Brien, who owns a wind energy company called Quixote, as well as the social media company Teleport, and who is also developing technology and resources to colonize the moon. Winston enlists O’Brien’s aid to create an alternative currency system in the rural valley, so that he and his neighbors won’t be enslaved by a Central Bank Digital Currency system.
Julia’s ex-husband sues to force Julia to vaccinate Honoré, and Winston gets caught breaking the law to get Honoré a fake certificate. Winston is brought to the site of the infamous eugenics prison/school in Harlem Valley, called The Wassaic School for Feeble-Minded Children, where he is tortured by O’Brien and learns of O’Brien’s horrifying Brainware experiments using foster children. Winston escapes with the help of the Lawn Chairs.
It turns out that it was Honoré who provided the evidence that the Lawn Chairs needed to get the Sheriff to raid the Wassaic School and save the prisoners and the tortured children.
Back at home Winston learns that Julia has betrayed him.
The final scene takes place, as in Orwell’s novel, at a café where Winston mulls over all that has happened. It is March 2022, the mandates have finally been lifted, but everyone’s hysteria has merely been displaced from C0VlD to the Russians.
But Winston is not depressed by this. He believes enough people have finally woken up. The story ends as Winston watches a parade pass by the café. His Lawn Chair friends play a ragtime version of Chopin’s Funeral March, signaling the end of the old corrupt system.