The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

It must be a shock when your whole life is in books to find out you have actually done something in the world for real

But he was very clever and very complicated and you can’t be clever and complicated and have everyone like you That is just not how it works And he ended up making himself very sad

Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.