IF YOU EXIST: In Search of a Reader Deep in the Future

"If You Exist" is a poignant message from an aging narrator to a future human, expressing worries about human extinction and species loss. Redefining "Hunters" and "Gatherers," she addresses the survival of life on Earth. Likening her message to a bottle at sea, she discusses humanity's current state, climate change, human migration, racism, the pandemic, technological advancement, and human redesign. Offering her perspective on hope, the book ends with a hopeful fantasy of a future meeting.

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About the Author: Lillian Moats
Lillian Moats was born in Detroit in 1946. She attended Barnard College and graduated with a B.F.A in art and creative writing from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in education from the University of Wisconsin. She has been an artist throughout her life, expressed in painting, film and illustration. From her mid-twenties through mid-forties, with her creative partner JP Somersaulter, she created over 20 short animated films for children and adults. These original stories and retellings of classic fairy tales have been shown and awarded in festivals around the world and are in the permanent collection of the Chicago Film Archive. Her drive to write rose to the forefront in 1993 and has continued to be her most satisfying creative outlet to the present. She has written a collection of original fairy tales, a fictionalized memoir, a work of creative non-fiction, another of political fiction and now a short philosophical essay with a twist.
If You Exist is a personal message written to no one living now, but rather to one of our human progeny who might find it many generations in the future. The aging narrator, like others in her generation, faces her own mortality at the same time she faces the possibility of thousands more species, including her own, becoming extinct. She speaks of “Hunters” and “Gatherers” as she has radically redefined these terms, and applies them to her concerns about the future of Homo sapiens and to the survival of life on our planet.
As a private heartfelt message to someone who may never exist, the writer likens her missive to “a note in a bottle set to sea in hopes of reaching you, if you exist in the future on some unfathomable shore.” The narrator shares her personal take on where humanity is now and where we might be heading depending on what choices we will make. Wishing that her imagined reader could answer questions about whether the writer’s anxieties have ever been resolved, she writes about climate change and such topics as human migration, racism, the pandemic, as well as her projected concerns about the possibilities of unbridled technical advancement and human redesign.
After offering her perspective on where hope could lie, the writer ends her note with “the stuff of fairy tales,” her positive fantasy in the final chapter called, “If We Could Meet.”

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Available in the following formats: .epub, .mobi

Price: $5.95 USD

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