Wayward (Wanderers, #2)

by Chuck Wendig

This is Black Swan: Black Swan is a fire, a river, a scream, a tectonic break—it is cracking teeth and a thousand fists and a million biting flies. Dragon and serpent and great Humbaba and Grendel’s mother. Behemoth, Leviathan. It is fury and grief; it is petulance and wrath. It is everything all at once.

Benji had always liked looking out the window when he was flying, and so he always requested window seats. (Even though some people groused about Benji opening the window shade. Travelers who refused to appreciate the wonder of the world! Why travel at all, then?)

Civilization was containment,

“Ahaha, yeah, the doomsday preppers all fuckin’ died, mate.” “He’s not wrong,” Linh said. As he spoke, his one hand left the flight controls and moved about the cabin like a loose bird. “What is the saying? No man is an island. Before White Mask, you could be. An island, I mean. You could create this little…ecosystem for yourself. But you were still connected to the rest of the world, even if you didn’t want to admit it. Someone canned that food. Someone made those glass jars. That generator, those solar panels, that medicine you’re hoarding? People made them. And when people go away, when civilization collapses, who is making your jars, your generators, your anything? And when that goes away, you’re left alone, and you go away, too. You want to survive, community is the way.”

“My dear, nothing matters. Literally nothing. It’s all just salt and stardust. The meaning that life has is only the meaning we are fit to give it.”

[Computers seem] to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy. —Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth

Grief is like a cut in a strange place. You never know when you’re going to bump into it, make it hurt again.”

The internet had been their Library of Alexandria, and White Mask had burned it down. (Of course, the internet was also an epic dumpster fire that probably had set in stone their course of self-destruction. Amazing how one thing could be so bad for the world, and so good for it. Then again, wasn’t that all of the markers and gains of civilization, from the knife to nuclear fusion?)

thought, not realizing that life had many endings, not just one. Little apocalypses and, as it turned out, big apocalypses, too.

What if our world, the one in which we have a computer that plays Minecraft, is just another layer of simulation? Would that thrill you, or disgust you? Does the idea titillate you…or make you afraid? Does it say that nothing matters, that there are no true consequences—or is it just that things matter differently, that the consequences are impermanent? As they are in many religions, by the way. I’ll tell you now: we are in a simulation. It’s the only explanation for, well, everything. Let me show you. —Anum Kirkhauser, in his transmedia series, Inside the Inside the Inside, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 as part of the New Frontier Story Lab

You should be reading books by Maryn McKenna, Carl Zimmer, and Ed Yong.