Notes for a Future Reader
A novel
Three years after artificial intelligence emptied the software profession, Eli Sayer is the last man in America still writing code by hand. Nadia Shin is the journalist sent to profile him. She stays too long.
The story
A love story about the work we do by hand
Three years after artificial intelligence emptied the software profession, Eli Sayer is the last man in America still writing code by hand. He builds small things for people who ask — a catalog for a two-hundred-book community library, a scheduling tool for a dentist — and he writes his comments in complete sentences, addressed to a future reader who will probably never arrive.
Nadia Shin is the journalist sent to profile him. She stays too long.
What she writes changes everything. It is the best work of her career, and it is dangerous for exactly the reason it is good — she has fallen in love with him, and the piece is precise enough to prove it.
The article makes him a symbol he never agreed to be and costs him the only room where his work was possible.
Now every road is a betrayal — and the only way Nadia has ever known how to love anyone is to put them into sentences.
Already read the book?
If you found your way here from the last pages of the novel, welcome. The Readers page has answers to frequently asked questions, and an easy way to send Howard your thoughts or ask him a question.
Thank you for reading.