So Much for That

by Lionel Shriver

There’s something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn’t get any better and it’s still shit.

His people were brilliant with the inanimate—with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter—the kind that can’t help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last—his countrymen were inept.