The Long Plateau
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Listen to parts of the book
9 audio previews from the book, read aloud — start with the prologue.
Just a taste — the whole century is in the book. Full audiobook available soon. Read it on Kindle →
About the book
Michael Jackson was born in the summer of 1982, the year the name stopped belonging to him. He grew up on both sides of a line his mother drew through the kitchen: her house of known drawers, index cards, and cakes made once, by hand, on one side — his father's wonderful, unreadable machines on the other. He chose the wall between them as a career.
As a technical translator, he was the man paid to turn the machine's language into a language a person could survive — the safest job a smart boy from a small town could have. Then the machines learned to say it themselves.
The Long Plateau is the century of one man, written in ink because a machine would have finished his sentences — and finished them better. From the Beige Ghost to the slab in every pocket, from a father who could open anything and read nothing to grandchildren who never had to bend down for anything at all, it is a story about shelves, cakes, and what a family keeps when the world stops making them do anything the hard way.
The details
About the author
Stephen Underwood writes literary science fiction from Murray, Kentucky — stories about ordinary people living through the strangest century in human history. The Long Plateau is his second novel, narrated by 99-year-old Michael Jackson, writing by hand to his granddaughter Ada about everything the world was before the screens.