At Electric Literature, Lydia Pine examines dystopian and sci-fi works of fiction that offer a glimpse of what bookshelves and libraries might look like in the future:
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Ayn Rand’s Anthem, books-on-bookshelves is actually a forbidden scenario. Even in the campy sci-fi universe of Star Trek, the twenty-fourth century boasts digital books stored on tablets; the Enterprise doesn’t waste space with something as antiquarian as a bookshelf. So when books on bookshelves do pop up in science fiction, they’re the cultural exceptions, rather than the rule. In those sci-fi futures, bookshelves symbolize past life on earth—they are artifacts that boasts a connection to long cultural history.
