The Utopians’ idea with modo mundo is that, if you killed a Utopian, you destroyed their world, their nowhere, their ideas, their fiction, since they all invent stuff even if they don’t all publish. You destroyed a potential other world, so you get banished to this one and don’t get to go to any other worlds anymore. I think what T.M. was trying to communicate was that destroying a manuscript is effectively the same thing, destroying somebody’s creation, the remnant of the world they created, even if they’ve been dead a thousand years.”
