“So soon?”

The remaking had been a hot topic for a number of years. After Imagination™ was deregulated in the early fifties, the outburst of creative alternatives generated huge difficulties for the Council of Genres, who needed a clearer overview of how the individual novels sat within the BookWorld as a whole. Taking the RealWorld as inspiration, the CofG decided that a Geographic model was the way to go. How the physical world actually appeared, no one really knew. Not many people traveled to the RealWorld, and those who did generally noted two things: one, that it was hysterically funny and hideously tragic in almost equal measure, and two, that there were far more domestic cats than baobabs, when it should probably be the other way round.

Whitby got up and looked out the window. There was nothing to see, quite naturally, as the area between books had no precise definition or meaning. My front door opened to, well, not very much at all. Stray too far from the boundaries of a book and you’d be lost forever in the interbook Nothing. It was confusing, but then so were Tristram Shandy, The Magus and Russian novels, and people had been enjoying them for decades.

“So what’s going to happen?” asked Whitby.

“I have a good friend over at Text Grand Central,” said Alyona Ivanovna, who had wisely decided to sit as far from Raskolnikov and the bloody ax as she could, “and he said that to accomplish a smooth transition from Great Library BookWorld to Geographic BookWorld, the best option was to close down all the imaginotransference engines while they rebooted the throughput conduits.”

This was an astonishing suggestion. The imaginotransference engines were the machines that transmitted the books in all their subtle glory from the BookWorld to the reader’s imagination. To shut them down meant that reading— all reading—had to stop. I exchanged a nervous glance with Whitby.