Author's Note: The Actor is the chronological sequel to White Matter only with a different cast of characters. It makes sense to read White Matter first, but you don't have to.
To Act:
1: Intentionally to perform an action.
2: To play a role. To imitate or mimic.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (1919)
"If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity."
Aldous Huxley, 1946 Foreword to Brave New World
"After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."
T. S. Eliot writing to George Orwell, rejecting Animal Farm for publication.
Cover photo credit: Ali Müftüoğulları
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The Actor
Science FictionJenny has grown up being told by everyone how clever she is, how she will go on to do great things one day. So when a man with an audacious plan enters her life, Jenny needs to decide not only whether he's for real, but just how real she is herself...