A Note from the Author

The world we live in feels inevitable. It isn't. The present order is less than seventy-five years old. As recently as the 2020s, most people believed that the old system, with all its shocking depravities and injustice, would last forever, and only needed a little patching.

This book exists because formal histories, however thorough, don't convey what it actually felt like to live in the old world, or what it felt like to leave it behind. The author has tried to solve that problem by wrapping the history in a story — a personal narrative that she hopes is interesting enough on its own to carry the reader through the parts that are instructional.

Some of the explanations here will seem obvious. That's the point. They were not obvious to the narrator, and the book is written specifically to help you forget, for a while, that they are obvious to you.

Whether readers in other times would also find something useful in these pages — some solid ground for imagining what comes next — is a question the author leaves open, with curiosity.

The author now steps aside. Juliana West will speak for herself.

Helen Leete San Francisco, 2101