"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

"The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats."

George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

When a minor British author of pre-war SF began his own dystopia a year later, he chose an opening sentence that carried massive echoes of Orwell:

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

"I felt that from the moment I woke."

John Wyndham The Day of the Triffids (1951)

When the critics have written about either of these introductions they have tended to normalise them. Patrick Parrinder quotes Orwell and then says:

"The world introduced by this sentence is not, fundamentally, an unfamiliar one. At most we would tend to react by thinking 'Huh! So they adopted the twenty-four hour clock'."

But supposing the clocks had been striking fourteen? That significant first sentence would have lost the weight carried by the unhappy significance of the number thirteen, and yet fourteen as the time at which Winston Smith came home in his lunch-hour would have been perfectly possible if Orwell had extended one feature of the war-years we have lost - Double British Summer Time. As another critic, Professor David Lodge, once said in his inaugural lecture, the first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four is realistic, yet the time struck makes it something more - Orwell took "thirteen hundred hours" and abbreviated it, and he realised that he would have neither Double British Summer Time, nor any other invention. Patrick Parrinder goes on to describe the novel as an "intentional Swiftian distortion of various aspects of (Orwell's) contemporary society". Oddly, though, it is with the realistic "thirteen" that Orwell chose to begin, even while Orwell was well aware of other satirical uses of time, for example in Lewis Carroll or F. Anstey. And just imagine what the metaphorical image of Big Brother's reign would have been if He could have introduced Double British Winter Time and made it as acceptable as all His other impositions. But Orwell did not - the role of time has repeated significance in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but some of its possibilities he never took up. A metaphor such as Double British Winter Time would have been too easy, and the satire too obvious, suggesting that "thirteen" was not chosen for its metaphorical power alone.

The normal constructs of time broke down in post-war England, and the first two major works of SF written by Britons in the modern era, chose a language of intense thematic similarity. Obviously Wyndham's construction was weaker, as his narrator has to spell out the significance of the day (although he has the benefit of the confusion of the secular and sacred) and Orwell does not, but their joint use of uncanny time cannot be ignored.

Now that some of the drafts of Triffids have been published it is possible to see how Wyndham worked his way to something much closer to Orwell. Wyndham first wrote: "On the day when the Great Calamity put an end to the world I had known for almost 30 years, I happened to be in bed with a bandage all around my head and over my eyes. Just a matter of luck, like most survival.

"I woke that morning with a feeling that something was wrong, and probably long after most people had found that things were disastrously wrong." (Quoted in The Times 27 Jan 1998 page 7).

We can see that the general reference to the Great Calamity has disappeared, as has the narrator's reference to his age, and the vague comment on luck. Exact days appeared instead, and the direct address to "you".

It is possible to see how Orwell created his first sentences, too. He first typed "It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, pushed open the glass door of Victory Mansions, turned to the right down the passage-way and pressed the button of the lift." Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile (1984)

Then by a series of crossings out and insertions the first sentence we know gradually developed. Nevertheless the original time - "thirteen" - was there from the first (whereas the year 1984 went through a series of changes). And just as Wyndham later removed the big adjectives - "Great Calamity", "disastrously wrong" - so Orwell removed the large scale - "a million radios", leaving both authors with a much more specific text. And the specifics of the text are time in its different formulations - "day", "April", "thirteen", "day", Wednesday", "Sunday", "moment".

And this is unusual. In fact, these works are almost unique in science fiction of their period. Orwell knew the pulps, and the classic authors such as Verne and Wells, and the more modern authors such as Zamyatin, but used nothing of them. Wyndham started writing for the American pulps before the Second World War, and actually wrote Day of the Triffids for the American slick magazine Colliers after the War. They called it Revolt of the Triffids, though - Wyndham had to restore the role of time in the title of the work when it was published in hardback.

Compare these books with what was happening in contemporary SF elsewhere and their difference is clear. Equally clear is that SF authors had not found another language or narrative method, even though time travel and paradoxes were a mainstay of the genre. Just look at a couple of first sentences: -

    "Masked eyes peered through the semi-darkness of the room." (Charles Harness, The Paradox Men, 1953);

or

    "From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department." (Philip K. Dick Time Out Of Joint 1959)

and they are physical. I'm choosing titles from David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels - but if I were to quote many of his titles from the same period I would be filling up the page, because the favourite opening of the Golden Age authors was to quote a piece of text - a dump of a Galactic Encyclopaedia, or a piece of pseudo-legalese. Asimov did it in the Foundation stories, but so did George Stewart in Earth Abides (1949) or even the political activist Bernard Wolfe in Limbo (1952); none of them seem to choose a style of telling in which the medium (the words, the tenses) can contribute to the message. And very few of these authors, contrary to the later teachings of Clarion and the How-to books, chose an opening that is an obvious "hook". Meanwhile, the third British author in Pringle's collection, opened: "The volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years." (Arthur C. Clarke Childhood's End 1954), as if to prove that this narrative method were a British idiolect.

There are exceptions: in 1955 Ward Moore wrote "Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error ... " (Bring the Jubilee), but he was writing and defining the boundaries of Alternate History. The most amazing example of an author failing to use the text to carry an implicit message is or was Robert Heinlein, one of the acknowledged masters of time manipulation in his fiction, who had become a major figure by the end of the 1940s. Consider the opening his "Future History" short stories such as 'By His Bootstraps': - "Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow." (1941); or 'If This Goes On -' - "It was cold on the rampart" (1940). 'All You Zombies' begins "2217 Time Zone V (EST) 7 Nov 1970 - NYC - 'Pop's Place': I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in." but that was not written until 1959, Heinlein was aping the police procedurals which were filling the radio and TV, and the notebook dating is a variation on the info dump. When they come to discuss the 1960s Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove say "Growing stylistic awareness was, to a great extent, kept in check by economic necessity" (Billion Year Spree chapter 12), but the differences between those with style who chose the medium of their narrative to carry part of the work and those without was clear twenty years before.

Mainstream authors knew the power of Orwell and Wyndham's method, even best-sellers used it (just think of the first sentence of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him") but somehow the American SF writers missed it. So while an exact year did not matter to Orwell (the facsimile shows a series of dates in the 1980s - Orwell just wanted something in the near future - not a detailed falsifiable prophecy) the detail he put into the first sentence shows his awareness of time as essential to the construction of his text, making it useful to identify exactly how it is done.

Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse (1980) which describes how time and sequence work in fiction does it mainly through a discussion of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Rather than summarise Genette myself, I want to quote from the review which introduced me to his method. P. N. Furbank's 1980 review says:

" ... merely to begin a section of a narrative by saying 'Three months earlier ...' sets off a whole train of logical whirrings in the reader's mind. The fact that what comes after in a narrative comes before in the story means that the narrative and story are in dissonance, and much of the meaning of the book many lie in this dissonance. Our example would constitute an ANALEPSIS. Its opposite would be a PROLEPSIS (narration or evocation in advance of an event that will take place later); and one has to distinguish a COMPLETING PROLEPSIS, which to some degree doubles a narrative section to come."

Orwell and Wyndham both chose prolepsis as their method of unsettling their readers. How Orwell might have continued to write no one can be sure: Wyndham lived and wrote for another fifteen years. David Pringle included his later Midwich Cuckoos (1957) in his 100 Best, and drew attention to the dissonance of Wyndham's work and its message: "If the book is read as a parable of the Generation Gap, though I doubt whether that is what the author intended, it becomes very frightening indeed." Wyndham again had shown the creatively powerful forces which might be driven by the convergence of these hidden forces - the discrepancy between two generations representing types of time. Now, both Orwell and Wyndham were setting out to write dystopiae and they were using the most powerful literary tools available to them. Wyndham had had a year or more to see how successful Orwell had been, should he have chosen to study Orwell closely (we will not know if he did until we can open the Wyndham Archive), but other authors must have been aware of the relationship of dissonant time and dystopia, even if they could not express it well. For instance, the astronomer Patrick Moore in his 1956 study Science and Fiction discusses dystopiae in just a couple of paragraphs within his chapter on time travel, partly perhaps because of his not considering dystopiae scientific enough to be considered "science fiction", but partly also, I suspect, due to Moore's suspicion that the books he mentioned troubled the rules of (non-scientific narrative) "time".

Time, though, may be recorded in different ways. Furbank goes on to discuss an interesting feature: the narrative power that Genette assigns to " ... the ITERATIVE ('For a long time I used to go to bed early') and especially to the PSEUDO-ITERATIVE, in which one pretends by the use of the imperfect to be describing as a recurrent event some scene that could scarcely have happened more than once with those particular details." ("For a long time ... " is the opening sentence of Proust's Remembrance). And that throws us back into Orwell - because the final summation of the year 1984 by its inhabitants is O'Brien's instruction to Winston Smith and we, the readers, who are addressed indirectly - "If you want a picture of the future, think of a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" - the ultimate repetition. Yet not the repetition of an event that has happened but that will happen. And will happen. And will happen. If Nineteen Eighty-Four has a purpose then that purpose is to stop the future happening. Orwell overrides the stereotype of "this is how iteration happens" to show how it should not happen.

And going back, coming across Furbank quoting that first sentence from Proust, I found that I had forgotten Wyndham's first sentence of The Chrysalids (1955). How could I? - "When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was." ITERATION, ANALEPSIS and an almost direct quote from the work which set it all off - was Wyndham so ignorant of what he was doing, as David Pringle suggests? I wonder if Arthur C. Clarke can tell us if Wyndham ever talked in the White Horse of the methods he was using to grasp and unsettle his readers. Or did he and Orwell keep their secret to themselves - that only in the interplay and nuance of language and story can readers be held and troubled long after they have put down the book that stays in their minds?