Aldous (not Aldus) Huxley might be forgiven for thinking it was a prediction given that at the time it was proposed to publishers (1948), “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was set thirty-six years in the future.
Of course this was not Orwell’s original intention: his working title for the book during its composition (starting 1944) was “Nineteen forty-eight” which made it an imminent catastrophe, not a future dystopia. It’s been suggested that the change in nominal date came at the behest of Orwell’s publisher, whereupon Orwell vacillated between different dates till finally deciding on a permutation of 1948, the year in which the manuscript was submitted for publishing.
