After The Reading Act
It had not been an Act about books.
The Reading Act, signed two years before, had been written as a *public-safety measure*. The argument had been that printed materials — particularly older ones — were a vector for *unverified information*, and that *centralised, certified, screen-based* sources were safer for citizens. Books were not, the Act insisted, *banned*. Books were merely *deprecated*. Owning a book in your home was not, technically, illegal. *Distributing* books — lending, gifting, selling — was illegal. *Operating a library* was illegal. *Possessing more than five books* was illegal.
The result, in the country where Karim lived, had been the same as a ban.
In the first year of the Act, the public libraries had been emptied. Their stock had been *processed* — most of it pulped, some of it scanned and uploaded to the certified state archive, where access required a permit. The librarians had been retrained. Some of them had been given new jobs. Some had not.
Karim's mother, Mrs Halpren, had not been retrained. She had been a children's librarian for twenty-three years. She had refused — politely, in writing — the new role offered to her at the certified archive. She had taken her redundancy package and gone home. She had spent the first year of the Act mostly in the kitchen, drinking tea, looking out the window. Karim had been twelve and had not, then, fully