Sublime

realizes that he needs to spend his life making strange things.

The algorithm is God,”

It’s a tablet, once considered the go-to device for science fiction stories about the future—my past—but they stopped being used when it was proven they changed brain chemistry, creating a vast societal addiction that reduced productivity and created generations of people capable of ignoring the world’s growing problems.

My real sympathy, though, is with the bright thirteen-year-old, curled on a sofa somewhere, twenty pages into the book and desperate to get to the root of the mystery of why cell phones aren’t allowed in Chiba City. Hang in there, friend. It can only get stranger.

Neal Stephenson.

THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.