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(J, a young person, at a desk, typing away enthusiastically at an invisible computer while addressing the letter to the audience.)

Dear Mr. Orwell,

Greetings from the distant future!  Well, distant for you at least – not so distant for me!  And not so futuristic, either.  That’s why I’m writing, actually.  But first, let me introduce myself: I am your Number One Fan, and your book, 1984, is my Favorite All-time Book.  It is really, really cool.  I also like Animal Farm.  Boy, imagine if that ever happened in real life!

Anyway, I am writing to talk to you about the future, particularly the future of 1984.  You see, 1984 – the actual year – isn’t the future anymore, it is very much the past.  In fact, it’s 2013 now.  That’s almost 30 years later – time flies, huh?  In fact, I was born after 1984, so 1984 – your book – was never really about the future, not for me, at least.  It was the future for you, definitely, so I guess one man’s future is another man’s past, right?  Does that make sense?

Anywho, I am writing to tell you that unfortunately, the future – either 1984 or 2013, and also everything in between – didn’t really turn out like you thought it would.  We are still in America, and if you were still alive, you would still be in England – not Oceania, or another super-big country that you made up.  Also, Big Brother is a TV show, not our leader, and not even a person; trust me, it’s totally different.  Speaking of TV, we don’t have the video screens everywhere so Big Brother can watch us like you were talking about – it’s just regular TV, and we usually have one in most rooms.  Also, we don’t change things all the time like the people in your book did – you remember how they went back and changed newspapers and dictionaries and stuff to pretend like things never happened?  Yeah, we don’t really do that.

So, yeah, that’s all the stuff I can remember right now.  Sorry.  Nice try!

But hey, things are still pretty different from when you were around.  In fact, I’ll bet being a writer today would be totally different.  You wouldn’t have to write by hand or use a typewriter anymore, either: you could do it on a laptop like I’m doing right now!  So much faster.  In fact, you can even write on your phones now, or at least on smartphones.  Mind: blown, right?

Oh, I should tell you about smartphones.  They.  Are.  Awesome.  They are basically like small computers that you can carry around in your hand.  Most of them are like all screen, and you just touch the screen for what you want.  It’s great because you can do stuff like surf the Internet – I’ll explain that some other time – and send texts to people – which are like little letters you write on your phone – and watch YouTube.  YouTube is great, you would like it.  It’s where people put up videos so everybody else can see what they’re doing.  Some people put stuff up all the time and other people like to watch what they’re doing all the time.  Same with Facebook.  And Twitter.  And Instagram.  I’m not really like that – like, putting things up all the time, or looking at people putting stuff up all the time – but if I wanted to be, I could, because I have a smartphone.

Smartphones are also great because they can send out signals to let people know where you are if you’re in trouble – sort of like an SOS.  You can basically track people where they are at all times if they have a smartphone, even a non-smartphone – would that be a dumb phone? – which is important when you’re tracking robbers and terrorists, because then they’re easier to catch.  You would think that because people would know where you are and what you’re doing if you have a phone, that you wouldn’t do something bad, right?  But people still do bad stuff.  That hasn’t changed.  Good thing us good people have someone looking out for us, right?

Anyway, I have to finish my reading in Huckleberry Finn for tomorrow.  I wish I was reading 1984 again, or even Animal Farm.  Did you know some people are trying to cut out the bad words from Huckleberry Finn?  They don’t want us learning it with bad words in it.  I say, hey, if you don’t like the bad words, why can’t we just read a different book?  Again, 1984…Animal Farm.  Hint hint!

Don’t tell anybody, but I like looking up bad words in the dictionary, or even just words like “nude.”  I don’t know why.

Thanks for letting me write to you.  I don’t know if you get mail where you are, but if you do, write back to me sometime, and make sure to sign it!

Sincerely,

-J

P.S. If I wrote a book called 2084, and I predicted a bunch of stuff about the future, and someone was born after the real 2084, and they read 2084 and saw that a bunch of the stuff I predicted about the future was wrong, do you think they would write to me to tell me how wrong I was?  Just a thought.