If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of… — Jasper Fforde

Whatever. As far as I can see, there is one state of dead and that’s ‘not living.’ Now, do you have anything useful to add to this investigation or not?”

My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offense—which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straightaway.

“Humans are molded by evolution to be short-termists, Miss Next,” he continued. His voice rumbled deeply and seemed to echo inside my head. “We need only to see our children to reproductive age to be successful in a biological sense. We have to move beyond that. If we see ourselves as residents on this planet for the long term, we need to plan for the long term.”