Choire Sicha

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Should I say a short story about climate-change apocalypse is fun? Choire Sicha’s brief, new Matter fiction, “Table of Contents,” certainly is, though it’s suitably sobering as well. The author imagines a scenario in which the seas have risen in a bad mood, and the narrator tries to aid the survivors by printing key entries from our modern Library of Alexandria, Wikipedia, before the plug is pulled. The opening:

I don’t know which will last longer, the paper or the ink. Eventually the paper will burn or the ink will fade, so read this all as fast as you can.

But of Wikipedia’s five-million articles, these 40,000 seemed to be the most super-important.

They’re crammed in these eight plastic-bagged boxes. because I printed it all single-side. That way you can make notes on the back! For instance, definitely keep track of who has babies with whom. (See the page for Incest, then check Consanguinity.) I put in some Bics, they should last a few… years? No idea.

After that, you can look up the Pen page.

I also put in Pen (Enclosure) in case you domesticate animals later.

In any event, please do not leave the entirety of portable human knowledge out in the rain.•

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Via a Choire Sicha post at the excellent Awl blog, I just learned of Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong To Us, an exploration of the “golden age” of plane hijackings in the late ’60s / early ’70s. The forthcoming book looks at a turbulent time in America, when you could fly a 747 through the credibility gap. Into this void of political and moral authority arrived one skyjacking after another, pretty much on a weekly basis. Koerner focuses on the case of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, a Vietnam vet and a party girl, who wrested control of a Western Airlines flight as part of an inchoate political protest, beginning the first leg of their insane journey.

The trailer for the book from the official website.

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