The Book Censor's Library

by Bothayna Al-Essa

He had learned that language should be an impenetrable surface. It should be smooth and flat with no bottom where meaning could settle. It was a censor’s job to curb imagination.

People who don’t eat don’t get hungry. His job was to fill the bookstores with drivel. He had to make sure no one craved books. He’d come to understand that they weren’t waging a war against books so much as a war against reading. Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away. In the future, he and the other censors wouldn’t need to ban any books—no one would read them anyway. It was as if he could see the future of humankind in a crystal ball.

HUMAN EXISTENCE IS SUFFERING. THE ROOT OF SUFFERING IS DESIRE. THE ROOT OF DESIRE IS IMAGINATION.

I know who I used to be before that book. I was a guardian of surfaces, then I fell down the rabbit hole,

There was a time when robots were modeled after humans, but now it was the other way around.

“When the world is this abysmal, getting used to it is the worst thing that can happen to you.”