The Future Library

Imagine if the Future Library had been conceived in 1914. What a human highway through time we'd be a part of. - David Mitchell 

                       

Margaret Atwood has completed a manuscript called Scribbler Moon. Planned for publication in 2114, the content is a secret until then. Future Library has attracted other writers who are creating work for the future. The project's director, Katie Paterson, sees it as a response to George Orwell's question, "How could you communicate with the future?"

Over the next 100 years, 99 more authors – one a year – will contribute a text to this future library. The Oslo library will house the sealed manuscripts. Paterson has given Atwood three rules. Atwood says, “I can’t say what’s in the box and I can’t just put a photo album in. But it could be any length, one word or 1,000 pages, a story, a novel, poems, non-fiction.”

“There’s something magical about it,” continues Atwood. "I am sending a manuscript into time. Will any human beings be waiting there to receive it? Will there be a ‘Norway’? Will there be a ‘forest’? Will there be a ‘library’? How strange it is to think of my own voice – silent by then for a long time – suddenly being awakened, after 100 years. What is the first thing that voice will say as a not-yet-embodied hand draws it out of its container and opens it to the first page? I picture this encounter – between my text and the so-far nonexistent reader – as being a little like the red-painted handprint I once saw on the wall of a Mexican cave that had been sealed for over three centuries. Who now can decipher its exact meaning? But its general meaning was universal: any human being could read it. It said: ‘Greetings. I was here.’”

Once the collection is completed, the library will print 3,000 copies of all of the texts; 1,000 certificates, entitling their bearer to an edition come 2114, are available now. Almost 100 have already been sold at £600 apiece. In 2114, the 1,000 trees planted last summer in the Nordmarka will be cut down for use in the project and all the texts made public.

Britain’s David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, has just been announced as 2015’s writer. The Bone Clocks deals with a dystopian future and the concept of time. Mitchell feels it is a "vote of confidence that, despite the catastrophist shadows under which we live, the future will still be a rightist place willing and able to complete an artistic endeavor begun by long-dead people a century ago."  

What would you send to the future?

http://www.futurelibrary.no/Future_Library_Katie_Paterson_Guide_2015.pdf