Tuesday 4 January 2011

January 4- Tedium

The bookshelves are stacked high in Terestria, the most boring tyranny in the world. Every day people shuffle into the state-owned shops to buy a new text with which to polish off the night, and these days some tell themselves they'd do so even if the penalty for doing otherwise was not death. The Terestirian presses issue new copies daily; the Terestrian Typesetting Ministry never closes, and the forests of the grand Terezon Basin grow thinner than the country's children. It would seem to many like an idyllic sort of place, if they never bothered to check the titles of the books.

For the books are dull, and not just mildly so. A Terestrian would kill (and indeed some have) for a copy of a book about balsa wood or fish stocks in Japan, and a work of fiction would be hailed as equivalant to the word of God. What they have instead is remarkable to anyone who doesn't have to read it: A complete, novel-length book about their Grand Dictator for every day of his life.

And what a life the Grand Dictator has! Sometimes he looks at the fish in his Western Pool; sometimes he looks at the fish in his Eastern Pool. Once (in a work the Terestrian Times hailed as truly groundbreaking) he even ascended up the Stairs of Glorious Despotism to manage to watch the fish in both pools at the same time. The books describe his eye movements, the twitches of his mouth as he glances back and forth at the carp as they skip around- indeed, they describe everything except his actual emotions as he watches, as asking about those is Strictly Prohibited By Law.

Revolution has never come to Terestria in all the many years of publishing, and the radicals who meet in secret under piles of discared paper have come to one conclusion. The country is too rigidly run and too beset by fear for rebellion to come the natural way; rather the Dictator must read the books of his life to realise just how boring, and how worthless, his period of rule has ultimately been. And so beside the bookstores and printing works there now sit vast numbers of unmarked graves, displaying just how many have tried and failed to deliver a single copy to the Palace on Marvellous Hill. It is an irony lost on no-one, but never ever uttered, that the queues that stretch to midnight would be shorter if joined by one man more.

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