Summer vacation 2020… Did they pick it up right there? On the fingerprint reader, which she’s never seen wiped down?” Too timely for some readers, not timely enough for others, pandemic-themed novels now occupy an uncomfortable, uncanny space.īut Emily St. Books like Lauren Beukes’s Afterland, written before the COVID-19 pandemic began but released right into its midst, were jarring to read in the summer of 2020, with lines like “Disneyland. In the past several years, this slippage has become especially noticeable in books about worldwide pandemics, for obvious reasons. There’s no telling what havoc that shift will wreak. By the time they read your words, your present will have become the past. As you write, you exist in the present and have access to the past, but the reader exists only in the future. Given the gap between when a book is “finished” and when it actually appears in bookstores and libraries, the world in which you write the book is never quite the same world the book will be released into. Writing a book for mainstream publication is always an act of time travel.
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