Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people had interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them...All others had to look outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports and with religion. How else could you see yourself as past of an adventure.
As you can tell from my reading lists, I don't really read sci-fi/fantasy, at least during the last two years. But I really liked Anathem. It's a seriously immersive read.
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