Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest.

• Author: Karlgaard, Rich

George Orwell: Since your day something has appeared called totalitarianism.

Jonathan Swift: A new thing?

Orwell: It isn't strictly new, it's merely been made practicable owing to modern weapons and modern methods of communication.

Orwell himself penned those lines (and read them aloud on his BBC wartime broadcast in 1942) in "Jonathan Swift: An Imaginary Interview." While Orwell's sentiments were his own, he cut and pasted together Swift's from the Irish-born satirist's estimable oeuvre. The result is a virtual dialogue between two of Great Britain's sharper minds, one remembered chiefly for Gulliver's Travels and "A Modest Proposal," the other best known for his 1948 anti-totalitarian novel, 1984.

Now Peter Huber, a Manhattan Institute fellow and Forbes columnist, has used the same technique to create Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest. (A palimpsest, the back cover helpfully reminds the reader, is a document that has been written upon several times, "often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible.") Unlike Orwell's, though, Huber's instruments of inventive plagiarism aren't scissors and glue, but more modern ones: a Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanner, Calera optical character recognition software, the Xy-Write III+ word processing program, and a fast 486 PC.

First, Huber scanned 1984 and everything else by Orwell he could find into his computer: novels, essays, BBC broadcasts - all told, a whopping 9.5 megabytes of Orwellian thought. Then Huber went to work, constructing an imaginary conversation between himself and Orwell, deploying Orwell's own language and imagery.

The stunning result is two books, to be read simultaneously: a "novel" that stars a protagonist named Eric Blair (Orwell's real name) and picks up where 1984 leaves off, and a running criticism of the historical George Orwell's literary career and intellectual mindset.

The novel part is a fetching read. In it, Huber cleverly jujitsus Orwell's own words into startlingly different conclusions than they held in their original contexts. Black has indeed become white (but unlike in Orwell's dystopia, freedom is not slavery, nor ignorance strength). Instead, 1984's most memorable symbol of the all-pervasive state, the omnipresent telescreen, becomes an instrument of proletarian revival in Huber's hands. In Orwell's novel, the telescreen meant, "You had to live...in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and...every movement scrutinized." But in Huber's world, rather than inhibiting activity, the telescreen breathes life into the soul and the marketplace and...