Hernan Diaz on Erasing Subjectivity
Editor’s Note: Read Hernan Diaz’s new short story “The Generation.”
“The Generation” is a new story by Hernan Diaz. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Diaz and Oliver Munday, the associate creative director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oliver Munday: Your story “The Generation” follows a 13-year-old in a grim future where the fate of humanity is in peril. The dystopian particulars are somewhat vague, which allows the narrator’s voice to anchor the story with idiosyncratic detail. How did this story emerge? And how did you decide how best to tell it?
It took a long time to finish this story. I wanted to write something about technology set in the future but didn’t want any space slang, techno-tchotchkes, or the hackneyed grittiness of dystopian fiction. It helped to realize
