A Catalogue of the Possible
stories
"Everything that could be made is already here, unmade and indifferent, waiting. The labour was never the making. The labour is the choosing of which few things to call into the light, and the long courage to leave the rest in the dark, where they were content to stay."
from the Manual of Completion, author unknown, edition withdrawn
Every story here is set in the same country — a place of clerks and keepers, verifiers and abridgers, of people whose entire work is to decide. A library holds every picture that could ever be made, and one official must certify only that each was found and never invented. A man is granted the power to do anything at once, and discovers he can no longer rest. A clerk sits at a counter where any request can be granted, and his whole office is to choose which ones should be.
They were written at a moment when making almost anything — a picture, a sentence, a plan — has come to cost almost nothing. When the old barriers of skill and distance and effort fall away, abundance stops being the achievement. What stays scarce is judgment: the knowing of what is worth making real, and the nerve to leave the rest unmade.
So the stories are about attention. About the honest read of what you have and lack. About tending the thing no one will witness, choosing well rather than doing much, keeping the single kind word. Beneath the strangeness runs a plain human question — what a person does, and how they pay attention, once nothing is difficult any more.
The people in these pages spend their lives deciding what is worth keeping. That is the subject of the book, and, in the quiet way of such things, its argument.
— A.K.