Books permitted
Books to be destroyed.
Naturally he didn’t have to read them himself; he simply had to feed them into a machine, and AI would appraise each work of literature.
A great many famous books went into the To-be-destroyed basket. They were too unpredictable. The authors had no sense of what life should be about. For example, Cathy and Heathcliff were enamoured of each other. The normal – and correct – plot sequence would be to have them start a family and not cruelly die in the Yorkshire moors. The plot was fickle and not conducive to fostering modern taste.
The novels by Jane Austen were to be destroyed immediately. That personage used too much irony, and irony creates multi meaning and confusion. How can a machine, for example, translate into another language a phrase that has more than one interpretation?
Hence poetry was definitely out, unless it had been composed by machine. It had too many ambiguities. Machine created poetry was definite and precise.
In the end (to keep a long story short) in the opinion of AI, all books were to be destroyed except for Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Vladimir Lenin’s Империализм как высшая стадия капитализма, and Mao Zedong’s Little Red Schoolbook.
That explains why everyone in the world is bubbling over with happiness.
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