The Long View has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months if that, and short-termism will spell our end. But the thing is, it needn’t be that way there’s a reason for it. The time engines don’t just need vast quantities of power – they need to run on time. Not punctuality, but time itself. Even a temporal leap of a few minutes will use up an infinitesimally small amount of the abstract concept. Not the hard clock time, but the soft stuff that keeps events firmly embedded in a small cocoon of prolonged event – the Now.
…
The Short Now is the direct result of the Time Industry’s unthinking depredations.
– Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2007, p. 287
The ship, the sea and the people on it might be hypothetical – but they could suffer and die the same as anyone.
– ibid., p. 323
if this small world was somehow sentient, it could be beaten
…
There was no one else in the room – there didn’t need to be. It was a hypothetical situation.
– ibid., p. 325
‘We’re Oral Tradtion but we’re not in a story – we’re an ethics seminar.’
‘You mean, you’re all hypothetical characters during a lecture?’
– ibid., p. 327
what was more important? The well-being of one real-life ethics professor, or the relentless torture of his subjects, who had to undergo his sadistic and relentless hypothetical dilemmas for two-hour sessions three times a week?
– ibid., p. 328
The only way to win the game is not to play.
– ibid., p. 330
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