Edition 1: If it can be conceived, it can be created
Jul 30, 2025
If it can be conceived, it can be created… it’s only a matter of time.
About 10 years ago, I set about trying to be a better writer and my strategy was to read as many books as I could and by some osmotic process, would be become better.
I started by going through the top 100 lists – many of which shared the same books in roughly the same order. Through my business journey, I read a lot of non-fiction books, but I was bored of them. It felt like work.
So I focused my efforts on the top 100 fiction books. Jumping to the end of this story, I got through about 20. Turns out I’m a slow reader and have a bad attention span… and this was pre-Tik Tok.
I got through some classics though. I gravitated to magical realism. Garbriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude my favourite followed by Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I also found Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Well’s Time Machine to be particularly curious. They awakened something in my mind.
And after some time, the nagging thread that I finally pulled was this – if it can be conceived, it can be created.
Of course in the context of this newsletter, technology would be the obvious insinuation here – but it’s not necessarily just that.
If an idea can be conceived, it can be created. 1984’s concept of thought crime is now eerily pervasive in our current political climate as an example. In Brave New World, the use of Soma for instant gratification and/or escapism has parallels to countless examples in our time.
What struck me about Well’s Time Machine was that he wrote it in 1895. I’m gonna say that again. He wrote Time Machine in 1895. I’m not saying that we can travel through time (yet), but geez – it doesn’t feel that far off, does it?
So what of Ernest Cline’s – Ready Player One, as both technology and an idea?
If it can be conceived, it can be created.
The technology in Cline’s world is current… we’re there now. Now what of the idea? A society plugged into a virtual world; an OASIS – if you will.
… it’s only a matter of time.
The Squid
Staff Writer