"'...Our Ford's first T-Model was put on the market.' (Here the Director made a sign of the T on his stomach and all the students reverently followed suit.)" (pg. 25)
The Director has mentioned Our Ford several times now, and I finally think I may have figured it out. The model T was the the first automobile produced by Henry Ford. So, I'm assuming that every time a character mentions Ford, he or she is alluding to this guy. I mean, yeah, he's obviously extremely important, but these people seem to consider him to be a god (or maybe THE God?). Maybe it was the technology from the automobile, or maybe it's something else entirely. When the Director mentioned the T-Model, everyone made a T on their chest, which I bet is more than coincidentally similar to how Christians make the sign of the cross. Following that line of thinking, I'm gonna guess that A.F. stands for After Ford. If it is Henry Ford (and I really do think it is), then he was born in 1863 and died in 1947, but they could be using any number of dates from between those two years (like the T-Model was produced in 1908), so I'm going to say this is probably set between 2495 and 2579. I obviously still think they're crazy, but if someone from five or six hundred years ago, read about our society, they would think we're crazy too.
(Sidenote: This may very well be the weirdest book I've ever read. Seriously? "...gross viviparous reproduction..." (pg. 24)? French, German, and Polish (and probably most other languages) are dead? My only response is: what the heck happened between now and then?)
No comments:
Post a Comment