Jon

30 December 2023

The Book Plague

The tale that ended all tales

At first they thought it was infections from paper cuts. Later, that the glue used for bindings had somehow been polluted with some neurotoxin, perhaps from the raven guano used traditionally to tighten the threads. Finally, it became apparent that no matter the source, library, bookstore, loaner, even self printed, it was the book itself that was the vector.

The theory most popular amongst public health experts was that the number of books in the world, together with translations and even perhaps fan-contributed literature, had led to a fatal level of cross-over and inter-textual mingling that, as with previous pandemics, spread literally, and figuratively like wildfire. And burning the books was not the answer, as the Americans discovered too late.

Of course, fundamentalist preachers used this to revive the old lie that the printing press, and the translations of the Good Book into living languages was the root cause of the plague. No matter how often shown to be untrue, for example, how was it that there was no trace of the bibliophage from Tyndale in the 1530s until the first confirmed cases in Hay-on-Wye in 2024? Soon after that, outbreaks in Buenos Aires and Palo Alto, Paris and Auckland, confirmed that what we now had was a new deadly pandemic, with no vaccine in sight. Indeed, even the blind were not immune, since the deadly disease seemed capable of being spread by audio books too.

It was not until the winter of 2025, after fully one half of the world’s population had succumbed, that it was finally discovered by researchers at DeepTome, where the mutation had arisen. It should have been obvious, but I guess people were loathe to revive the suspicions about existential threats from artificial intelligence which had been so thoroughly debunked by Crowcroft and Spillane in their seminal paper on Lame Language Models. No-one suspected how wrong they could be until it was nearly too late.

Now we are wiser, even if incurably less well read. And now a new chapter begins. In the end, there is, no longer, the word.