Death of the library: A speculative poetic response to the loss of books

What seemed like a prosaic visit to a newly re-furbished university library, triggered a speculative epiphany of a dystopian possibility. By means of satirical speculative poetry the future of the library and books, as concepts, is explored against the emerging zeitgeist of technopolitical domination by a burgeoning anti-democratic oligarchy. In an original poem called “The Library”, the author’s voice is focalised through the poem’s protagonist, T. L. Robertson, the Western Australian educationalist after whom the library is named. As a fictionalised Robertson visits the library, the subjectivity of the author coalesces with prevailing technoscientific and commercial trends, resulting in an existential pondering of the future of books, knowledge and the relationship of the individual to both. The article considers the synergy of speculative fiction and speculative research as a unifying explanatory paradigms for poetic truth, in which the symbiotic relationship of now-time and future-time is explored.