Margaret Atwood has written a new story, and no, you can't read it.
This week, Atwood officially became the first author to submit her manuscript for the Future Library project, an inventive idea that will see her work published in 2114. So what's it going to be doing until then? Waiting for the pages on which it will be printed to grow, actually.
Future Library, which was created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, will have artists submit one work a year for the next 100 years. In the meantime, the 1,000 trees which were planted for the express purpose of writing those books near Oslo, Norway will grow.
"It is my dream that Margaret Atwood is writing for Future Library," said Paterson in a press release. "I imagine her words growing through the trees, an unseen energy, activated and materialized, the tree rings becoming chapters in a book."
Atwood has been a huge advocate of the project and its time capsule-like notion from the get-go, telling the Guardian, it's "the kind of thing you either immediately say yes or no to."
In a post on online writing community Wattpad, Atwood explained her involvement in her inimitable style:
"As a child, I was one of those who buried treasures in jars, with the idea that someone, some day, might come along and dig them up. I found similar things while digging in the various gardens I have made: old nails, old medicine bottles, fragments of china plates... That is what the Future Library is like, in part: it will contain fragments of lives that were once lived, and that are now the past. But all writing is a method of preserving and transmitting the human voice."
She also launched a contest with the site that will reveal the title of her contribution to Future Library, as well as encourage writers to craft their own tale based on it.
According to WWD, British author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks) will be the next contributor to Future Library.
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