Stranger than fiction: What - and how - we'll be reading in the future
Thirty years is a long time in the world of literature, but a quick read of his crystal ball tells Ewan Morrison we will soon be turning the page on ebooks, the Western tradition – and the truth
When China became the world’s leading economy in 2024, the West was forced to admit it was now the frontrunner in debt accumulation and little else. The yuan became the global reserve currency in 2032, leaving the West with no say in determining the form of the planet’s economy, the internet, publishing and fiction.
The world of 2043 is a place of state-enforced paywalls and firewalls, state censorship and surveillance through the net – the reverse of the carefree life we knew in 2013, when we all threw away our rights to privacy in the name of “sharing”.
People are now wary of all social media, fearing they’re largely tools for surveillance, propaganda and behavioural manipulation. In this, the “useful idiots” in the United States played no small part, by legitimising snooping through the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA), Facebook and so on. In 2043, the internet is no liberator sweeping away authoritarian regimes. Rather, it offers “bread and circuses” to the masses, distracting them from the time-consuming task of political organisation with pirated movies, free porn and LOLcats.
China entered the digital revolution late and, as a result, had a chance to learn from the mistakes of the West. It witnessed the demise of the bookshop, the shrinking of publishing houses to three vast monopolies and the freefall of ebook prices. It saw how zombie mash-ups had cannibalised the Western canon and realised that Marx was right: capitalism, left to its own devices, would devour itself.
While the West frittered and Twittered its time away, China became the only hope for the survival of literature, with its state-enforced literacy programmes, its veneration of high literature and lifelong learning, its vast guaranteed audience, its government-funded five-year cultural development plans, its 500 state-owned publishing houses and bookshops and its writers’ unions. Writers, musicians and filmmakers scrambled to break into the Chinese market as they once strove to make it in the US.
There was once a utopian internet belief that thousands of fledgling writers would be able to forge a brave new future in digital publishing, shaking the foundations of the old elitist media corporations. But warning bells first sounded in 2012, when it emerged that half of selfepublished authors earned less than HK$4,000 per imprint per year.
Devastating confirmation came in 2013, when it was revealed that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling had written a book under the name Robert Galbraith. Rejected by many mainstream publishers, it lurked unseen among the hundreds of thousands of books by unknowns on the internet.