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    The Future Library: A Tor.com Original
    The Future Library: A Tor.com Original
    The Future Library: A Tor.com Original
    Ebook47 pages43 minutes

    The Future Library: A Tor.com Original

    By Peng Shepherd

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    About this ebook

    More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining forest on Earth discovers a secret about the trees—one that changes not only her life, but also the fate of our world.

    Inspired by the real-life “Future Library,” a long-term environmental and literary public art project currently underway in the Norwegian wilderness.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 18, 2021
    ISBN9781250828675
    The Future Library: A Tor.com Original
    Author

    Peng Shepherd

    Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, and Mexico City. Her second novel, The Cartographers, became a national bestseller, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The Washington Post, and received a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her debut, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today show and NPR’s On Point.

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      Book preview

      The Future Library - Peng Shepherd

      18 August 2125

      Kløfta, Norway

      You wonder what this letter could have to tell you, because you think you already know everything about the Future Library. Who doesn’t? It’s the only story on NewsLens, every day, all the time. They’re making yet another movie, and another virtual reality experience, and even a porn game. You can make anything into porn, I guess. Even forests. You’ve probably even entered the library’s Forever Contest yourself, in the hopes that you’re one of the one hundred who is selected each year, out of billions. One of the one hundred who will become immortal.

      I didn’t participate in the official documentary, because the whole thing was a lie. And also because I was in prison on eco-terrorism charges at the time. I put this in quotations on purpose. Because of the nature of my crimes, I had no computer access or right to be interviewed during my trial, or after. The Future Library’s lawyers made sure of that.

      It was a life sentence, until Gunnar came to see me at Ullersmo Prison.

      Nothing is for forever. Not a life sentence, not a forest.

      Not even the Forever Contest.

      They have hidden so much from you, but no longer.

      My name is Ingrid Hagen, and I’m the one who discovered that the trees can talk.

      I’m not good at telling stories. I started out as an arborist, not a librarian. Leaves, sure, and roots, but words were never really my thing. Well, until they were.

      I have to start at the beginning, so you’ll understand.

      I grew up in Oslo, in the Grønland area just north of the central train station. My mother went into labor early in the summer of 2050, when half of the Americas and a good portion of southern Europe were on fire. All the drought, and so much heat, they said. The icebergs had melted too much, the transportation industry was still using too many fossil fuels, and so on. It was being called the Red Summer then, because no one could know at that point that it wouldn’t burn out before the end of that summer. That it never really would burn out, per se. It would just eventually run out of trees to devour. But it was still grey and wet in Norway in those days, and even cold some of the time. Some of my earliest memories are of begging to borrow my mother’s iScreen so I could watch Operation Green’s joint international effort to protect the

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