The novel that George Orwell wrote, 1984, gave rise to now familiar terms like ‘thoughtcrime’, ‘big brother’ and ‘Orwellian’. In his novel government agencies are hard at work to cleanse society of wrong thinking, and has defined what ‘correct’ thinking is. Saying (or writing) the wrong thing gets you arrested for “thoughtcrime”. People arrested for thoughtcrime get disappeared into a gulag of prison camps.
Intellectual courage in the face of official censorship.
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It was supposed to be fiction
I’ve always been interested in Orwellian themes of individual courage in the face of oppressive autocracy. When I first started working on Heretic a few years ago, I had in mind autocratic regimes in distant, far off countries such as Russia, China and North Korea – and increasingly countries like Hungary and Belarus – in which freedom of thought and expression is actively repressed. People who don’t tow the party line are arrested – especially in Russia where it’s a criminal offense to question the war against Ukraine.
It was supposed to be fiction. I didn’t think I’d see it coming to America. But watching the insanity now sweeping the US, it’s only a matter of time before Trump and Elon go after the free press and start shutting down dissenters.
What’s happening in the US is fascism 101, right out of Hitler and Mussolini’s playbook.
It will soon be a thoughtcrime to question Trumpism
Heretic follows the story of Jack, who is raised by his mother to be a loyal citizen of the New Order. The Order has strictly defined what is acceptable to believe and think, and has banned all books and social media platforms that it does not approve of. Dissenters are arrested as intellectual terrorists.
Jack’s father was a famous scientist who went missing shortly after being branded a criminal for intellectual dissent. Later, his father is presumed dead in a suspicious car crash.
But Jack’s life is turned upside down when he finds evidence that his father is still alive – and on the run from the Tolerance Bureau, the federal police force assigned to track down dissenters. Jack risks everything to look for his father, and soon finds himself in a deadly race against shadowy agents of the New Order who also want to find the missing scientist.
Heretic is about intellectual courage in the face of fascist censorship. It’s a future that is starting to look all too plausible now.
