Margaret Atwood is working on a new book—but it won’t come out for another 100 years, in 2114.
That might irritate some fans of the Booker-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, since we’ll probably all be dead by the time the book sees the light of day. I know I was a little irked. But then I read about the details of the project, and I’m annoyed no more—because even if I’ll never get to read Atwood’s new book, the project sounds like the coolest thing ever.
The Guardian has the details:
Atwood has just been named as the first contributor to an astonishing new public artwork. The Future Library project, conceived by the award-winning young Scottish artist Katie Paterson, began, quietly, this summer, with the planting of a forest of 1,000 trees in Nordmarka, just outside Oslo. It will slowly unfold over the next century. Every year until 2114, one writer will be invited to contribute a new text to the collection, and in 2114, the trees will be cut down to provide the paper for the texts to be printed – and, finally, read.
Awesome. I love the idea of Atwood’s words growing with the trees, a latent power building from the ground and waiting to be unleashed on the world. The whole project strikes me, also, as a tremendous show of faith in the power of books and of words—both now, and in the future. I mean, who’s to say that the people of 2114 will even read books anymore, and ones on paper pulped from trees, no less? Perhaps the world Atwood’s work emerges into will by a dystopia of the kind she wrote about in The Handmaid’s Tale, or an apocalyptic wasteland like she wrote about in Oryx and Crake. Perhaps humanity won’t be interested in the words of a writer who died long ago. Perhaps humanity will have destroyed itself.
But the fact that this project is being undertaken, and that Atwood is taking part in it, is a show of faith in humanity, and in the future, and in the power of story. Paterson and Atwood are betting that the future is a place where a book can still live, and breath, and speak to people. I can only imagine what kind of book Atwood is writing, what kind of message she wants to send to the people of 2114.
Read the whole story here. It’s pretty inspiring.
