But a list of the texts left undamaged by the sabotage seemed more perverse than random. Quaint science fiction that hadn’t been read in a hundred years, pornography, forgotten best-sellers, nurse novels, costume-opera fantasies, the complete works of Mickey Spillane. It seemed to O’Hara that whenever she tried to find a worthwhile piece of writing it was invariably gone, the blank spot in the index flanked by titles of aggressive worthlessness. The logic behind it was clear: with automatic data entry and its compact charmed-hadron memory system, the library in New New had consumed everything written, with no regard for anybody’s opinion of its quality. So 98 percent of the library was crap, and a random one tenth of that was still 98 percent crap.

One thing that particularly galled O’Hara was that, because of some peculiarity of storage, every existing kinetic novel came through unscathed—including A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space, the dreadful romance upon which Evy wasted several hours every week. Kinetic novels were the blasted progeny of the amateur publishing “revolution” at the end of the twentieth century. For a small subscription fee you were not only allowed to read the novel, but could attempt to revise it. You could add a section or rewrite an existing one, and send your masterpiece in to the publisher. If the publisher gave tentative approval, the change would be reviewed by a hundred other subscribers, selected at random. If half of them liked it, it would become part of the novel, and you would be listed as coauthor. Some classics had more than a thousand co authors.

The writers who created the original templates for these novels obviously needed a certain sense of detachment toward their craft, as well as a talent for introducing accessible infelicities, upon which the paying customer could gleefully pounce. On Earth they had been well-paid celebrities, often more interesting than their books. Marc Plowman, author of A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space and thirty others, had been a serious poet until he typed out a kinetic novel and discovered in himself an appetite for fast horses and slow women.

Time/Space had grown to be more than two million words in length—more convoluted than Remembrance of Things Past, more characters than War and Peace, more confusing than a tax form. O’Hara asked Evy why, if she had so much extra time and energy, she didn’t go rack up a couple of master’s degrees? Evy said that if O’Hara would just once allow herself to do something frivolous, she might notice this odd sensation called “having fun.”