The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction

The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction 4.15.2020
Charles Yu
Read more in The Atlantic

What we are experiencing as “unreal” is brutally real: deaths, financial collapse, unemployment, widespread suffering. Shattered illusions: that we are separate from nature; that life on Earth is stable; that our structures can protect us, that we can predict the future. When the suffering subsides, our “long-term viability” will have been served if we “have changed our ways of thinking,” have gained humility and a new ability to imagine “how fragile and rare our ordered structures are … and how precious. How, next time, we might rebuild them, stronger

Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe and three additional works of fiction, was honored in 2007 among “5 under 35” by the National Book Foundation. He is Taiwanese-American.