Images of 1984: Stories from Oceania is an Alternate History timeline originally posted on AlternateHistory.com between 2008 and 2010 by user Will Ritson, which attempts to give a plausible historical backstory for the situation described in George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It plays off a commonly-expressed theory regarding Orwell's most famous work: specifically, the idea that Oceania, the positively horrifying society in which the novel takes place, is not the the world-bestriding empire it claims to be, but a decaying pariah state that only controls Great Britain, desperately using fanaticism and hatred of the outside world to compensate for political impotence. With a Point of Divergence in 1931, Will Ritson charts a bleak course for Great Britain as it descends into economic turmoil, political radicalism, and severe social instability before erupting into a chaotic civil war that eventually turns it into the most terrifyingly oppressive and miserable society that has ever existed in human history.
The author made his last post on the original thread
in March of 2010, partway through the storyline; the timeline was rebooted in 2014 on a new thread, then died off once again the following year. As such, it can safely be considered a Dead Fic.
Images of 1984 provides examples of the following tropes:
- Alternate History: Everyone in Great Britain had better hope so.
- Continuity Nod: Given that it's a prequel of sorts for a preexisting work of fiction, Images of 1984 is full of these, mostly to give explanations for the bits and pieces of the past that Winston Smith is able to recollect in the original novel.
- The nuclear destruction of Colchester, which is mentioned in passing near the beginning of 1984, is revealed to have been the last major military action of the English Civil War, and the means by which the right-wing and counter-revolutionary Chiltern regime destroyed most of the remaining troop strength of its principal enemy, the left-wing and revolutionary Cambridge Affiliation.
- At one point in 1984, Winston Smith talks to a geezer old enough to remember life before the hellish regime took control, and the only substantial "hint" he gives involves an unidentified man giving a speech in Hyde Park in which he called the Labour Party "hyenas" and "flunkeys of the ruling class". In this timeline, it was Oswald Mosley speaking in 1952, after Labour had seemingly betrayed the socialist cause by forming an alliance with the Conservatives to preserve national unity in a country that was rapidly becoming fractured and violent.
- One of Winston Smith's earliest memories involves him rushing down into a Tube station during an air raid. According to this interpretation, this was not an aerial bombardment perpetrated by a foreign power, as some have theorized, but artillery fired on protesters in 1955 by reactionary elements of the British Army and civil service, as they initiated their plan to crush the latent revolution and preserve Britain's class system from upheaval.
- Crapsack World: A given. Over the course of the (unfinished) storyline, Great Britain embodies this trope more and more until, by the 1970s, it has become Oceania.
- Dead All Along: Arguably the most important question to answer when trying to craft a historical backstory for 1984 is that of the identity (or lack thereof) of Big Brother, the all-seeing, omnipresent head of state in the original novel. Will Ritson's answer does not disappoint: it turns out that the images and films of Big Brother that adorn every wall and street corner of London in 1984 are just old photographs and recordings of a deceased Oswald Mosley (who was killed during the Civil War in 1957), reworked and rehashed by Rupert Murdoch into an immortal figure of propaganda.
- In Spite of a Nail: Despite the considerable sociopolitical implications of Great Britain becoming completely cut off from all of the outside world, several of the same individuals end up becoming President of the United States.
- Despite the point of divergence being in 1931, everything outside of Great Britain goes more or less exactly as in our timeline up until 1944 (see below).
- A post in the rebooted timeline implies that by 2014, the Soviet Union has dissolved as in OTL.
- For Want Of A Nail: The point of divergence (Oswald Mosley and his breakaway "New Party" merging back into Labour in 1931, rather than turning toward fascism) has little impact on European politics outside Britain during the 1930s, and World War II still starts and progresses just as it did in our timeline. However, minor butterflies force the D-Day landings to be pushed back several months, ultimately making them far less successful than in OTL, leading to a much bloodier liberation of Western Europe involving a nuclear weapon being dropped on Hamburg to prevent the Soviets from going too far in their conquest of the former Third Reich.
- Nuke 'em: A total of five nuclear weapons are dropped in this alternate history: two on Japan in 1945 as in our timeline, one on Hamburg in the same year to blunt the Soviet expanse into Nazi Germany, and two on Colchester that wipe out most of the Cambridge Affiliation's troops and effectively end the English Civil War.
