“The Future Library” by Peng Shepherd

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Story can be read on-line: https://www.tor.com/2021/08/18/the-future-library-peng-shepherd/

Rating: 3/5 Stars

Based on the actual Future Library project, where stories are collected to be published in a hundred years time on trees planted at the beginning of the project, this story takes a fantastical and magical spin by imagining the project in a world on the brink of ecological disaster, and the forest is the last remaining one in the world.

Told in first person by the curator of the project, the story jumps in time from the beginning of the project to where the first tree was felled, to be used to publish the first story collected, and after. This is where things begin to turn strange, as the narrator realizes a truth about the trees that the Foundation may not want the dying world to hear, and has her jailed as an eco-terrorist to bury the truth.

It is a bleak story of a world with no ecological future, where the efforts of one person to tell the truth about the trees aren’t enough to save humanity.

Story read from 2021/11/18 to 2022/11/21