Reading for Our Future

Abstract

In dystopian novels the future is often imagined as a place where to read is a disappearing art. For the oppressed women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for example, reading is something close to a ‘sin’ and only during an affair is the heroine, Offred, permitted to engage in such ‘illicit’ activity. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to read is fraught with difficulties because books are subject to a process of ‘continuous alteration’: ‘All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary’. Perhaps most dramatically, in Doris Lessing's The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, set after a future ice age, an ancient library is destroyed when it is exposed to the air: ‘The scribes were trying to sort the books into languages they knew, but … as each was opened, it began to crumble. Dann, desperate, grief-stricken, grabbed up book after book and saw it disintegrate in his hands.’1