Back in the 2020s, everyone was in a tizzy about population collapse. The thinking back then was that if we didn’t have enough children, they wouldn’t grow up and generate enough money, and the economy wouldn’t be big enough to do expensive things like cure diseases and build space colonies and come up with teleportation.

The internet caters to our baser interests, surfacing clickbait news, ragebait on Twitter, thirst-traps on Instagram, the dumbest thing you can watch on TikTok, the most attractive person on your dating app, and the cheapest things you can buy from Temu. They cater to our love of drama, our superficiality, our hedonism, to get us to scroll, click, buy, and spend our hours addicted to the screen. They make more money that way.

Margaret Atwood has a new novel coming out in 2114. You read that correctly: the bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale will publish her last book Scribbler Moon long after we are dead. We won’t get to read it, our kids won’t get to read it, but maybe their kids will—and that’s kind of the point.

I have a dream... 

The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.”

After I completed my first novel, I had dreams of a beautiful black book, its ivory pages sewn into the binding, the title embossed in gold leaf, a single red ribbon denoting the place where a reader might pause in their reading, adrift in another world.

Long ago, the first Mage Queen wrote in her grimoires that the world was divided into 16 orders. On Earth, we quarreled and fought against one another for centuries—until the demons invaded and threatened to overthrow us all.

We convened in the great hall, where stone ancestors watched from the walls as we tried to remember the words that would begin our session. We didn’t, and so we read them from ancient tomes, cracked and worn by the centuries. 

Last night came a vision I could no longer ignore: The Divine City shook, lurching violently from its place in the sky. I could hear the screams of the citizens down below, crying for the dragons to save us as we hurtled toward the earth.