[instructions: highlight the following passage. right click. click speech, and then click 'start speaking']

virtual, free, healthy, comfortable, homogenous, mandatory, consistent, medicated, patched, fixed; dystopia is a cliche associated with boring young adult sci fi novels that need an easy setting. strip the political undertones OR drop the post-war/crisis world OR just don't be bad. have good taste. is it so hard? i'm starting to think it might be. the only future that won't feel dated in 5 years is an abstractly complex one; a deceptively thin one. leave the holes, leave the missing pieces out; don't even think of them. you wake up twenty years in the future. it is 2038. you get out of bed, pee, and brush your teeth. you go to work. you come home and watch slightly better tv than you had twenty years ago. you eat. you go to sleep. repeat each day for 120 years. still not sick and withering away? how boring