Coffee with Books Made of Flesh
If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you into my tangle of words. Put your feet up. Relax. Tell me… would you say you have an untold story?
When I was 13, I wrote a book or at least, I tried to. It was a sci-fi story, a little silly, and very dreamy. Had I known the term Afrofuturism back then, I would have claimed it for my novel attempt.
The opening line went something like: “He switched off the newspaper, stood up and walked out of the room.”
When I shared it with my beta readers, aka classmates for peer review, they laughed. And laughed. And laughed some more. “You don’t switch off a newspaper. You fold it.” They said.
I tried to explain. The story was set in the future. The newspaper wasn’t a paper, it was on a screen, so you could switch it off.
For context, this was the late ’90s. I had never seen a computer in real life.
And yet, somehow, I had imagined something eerily close to what we now call an e-book reader or tablet.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you how weirdly they looked at me as I described, a flat surface, where words that appeared. Something you could hold but not fold. Even now, I cannot fully explain where that idea came from, only that I have always had a habit of dreaming slightly ahead of my time.
Now we are here, and eBooks exist, and so do audiobooks. And some audiobooks are even read in the voice of the authors themselves…
Pretty soon, if not already, I am sure you will be able to get an ebook AI software that reads to you, perfectly mimicking the voices as the author intended or better yet, a virtual version of the author you can interact with, telling the story in their own words…
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that this future, in some ways, already exists.
There is an initiative where, instead of borrowing a book, you borrow a person. They are called Human Books. Real people, with real stories, who sit across from you and allow you to “read” them through conversation. It is called the Human Library, an initiative by The Human Library organisation
And as someone who often says that there is an unwritten book inside everyone, as a gentle nudge to get people to write, I now find myself reimagining what a “book” will be like.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that perhaps the next generation of storytelling will no longer be confined to pages and screens. Stories will be virtual reality spaces. Imagine not just hearing a story, but standing inside it, experiencing it, walking through memories and even asking questions.
Oh, if you could see inside my mind, picture it, something a cross between a pensieve dish from Harry Potter, A Black Mirror episode, and the books you find in the restricted section of The Library Of The Dead.
Books made of flesh.
WinterABC26
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