Visions of Dystopia by George Orwell
Foreword by D.J. Taylor, Edited and Introduced by Professor Richard Bradford

(Flametree Press, 2021)

Reviewed by L.J. Hurst

One day when Winston Smith went to work without his black shabby briefcase he was stopped in the street and given one. Later, he discovered that it contained a ‘heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover’. That was ‘the book’. Visions of Dystopia in some ways disguises itself as well, as it has the appearance of a medieval grimoire, its impressed cover gleaming with red, black and silver ink, and a single eye staring out. It is actually a theme anthology: the publishers, Flametree, have republished four of Orwell’s other works individually, but this thick volume contains three of his books: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the non-fiction Homage to Catalonia, all complete, along with extracts of two more of his earlier works. Following biographer D.J. Taylor’s Foreword, there is a longer Introduction by Richard Bradford, and finally extracts from two earlier dystopian works known to Orwell—Jack London’s The Iron Heel (which Orwell reviewed early in WWII as one of the ‘Prophecies of Fascism’), and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (which Orwell had also reviewed towards the end of the War).

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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.