George Orwell, the famous author of dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” died in 1950, well before the date his work was set in. But that didn’t stop him from rising from his grave of 71 years this Tuesday, reportedly explaining that he was just “checking up on how the world was doing.”
Witnesses at the All Saints’ Church in Sutton Courtenay, England who met Orwell explained that he initially seemed pretty pleased with what he saw.
John, an avid Orwell fan visiting the grave from America and one of the witnesses who agreed to an interview, recounted that “We kept the whole Snowden thing and all of that from him. I mean, we would have told him eventually, of course, but it just didn’t seem like a good idea this soon.”
Instead, the guests at the church attempted to show him all of the amazing technology that had been invented over the past seven decades, with which Orwell was summarily impressed. It was at that point, explained our interviewees, that things went wrong.
Orwell wanted to go to a bookstore, to see with his own eyes that his books were still on the shelves seven decades later. “I guess I would feel the same, in his situation,” John related. “The trouble is, bookstores are a dying breed. I mean, do you have any idea where the nearest Barnes and Noble is?” So, naturally, they pulled up Google Maps and let Orwell check it out. “That was our big mistake,” Mary, another interviewee and one of the church regulars, said. “You know, nobody reads the Privacy Policy these days, but Orwell, he took it like an actual contract, and we couldn’t get him to stop reading.”
Reportedly, as he kept reading, Orwell began to grow deathly pale. “Well, more so than he already was,” Mary corrected. “The more he read, the more fixated he became on finishing the bloody policy.” According to witnesses, when he reached the end, he just made a small sputtering sound and stopped moving. Eventually they checked his pulse and it turns out he had simply returned to death. “Must have just shocked the spirit right out of him,” John explained.
A re-funeral will be held for Orwell at the church this Saturday, and Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, has generously agreed to sponsor the festivities.
Editor’s Note: The above article is published in the Watchdog’s April 1st column, The Watchcat, and is a work of satire.
