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. 

Last night I had a vision—she warned me they would come. The truth is I’ve felt them coming for some time. There have been signs, omens even, that the floating city might, at last, be falling—that the spells our ancestors spoke, suspending us in the sky, are faltering.

In which Scott Paul battles the forces of Mormonism in the Metaverse.