This is a horror story. In fact, it’s a horror story about a horror story.

This would be an excellent spot to stop reading. In 1993, I wrote a short story with a decidedly downbeat tone. It was so downbeat that the note I got back from Gardner Dozois, who was then-the editor at Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, was, “I rarely say this, but this is too dark.” …

In May 1933, several thousand people gathered in Berlin’s Opera Square. They brought with them books—25,000 of them—from authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London, and Albert Einstein. At the end of the evening, they piled the books into a great mound. … Then—with a band playing and universal applause—they burned them. As the flames roared up, the crowd heard a speech from Minister of Enlightenment Joseph Goebbels. The era of critical race theory is over, Goebbels told them. Then he said that the flames would end to wokeness. …