Despite 10:04 being a novel, which makes it fiction, the story is written in such a way that it seems like it could be non-fiction. The novel does this by making the events in the story very ordinary and relatable. It starts off with our main character who has a real heart disease, Marfan. As the story goes on, we see popular places that exist in New York appear in the story, such as the High Line, Prospect Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To further solidify the feeling of the story being nonfiction, we see references to real life events that happened, with the first being 9/11. “‘When all the skyscrapers freeze they’re going to fall down like September eleventh,.’ he said in his typically cheerful tone, but more quietly, ‘and crush everyone’ (12). Shortly after that they mentioned global warming and Kony 2012 which kind of startled me because of how recent these events were. I then found out that this book was published in 2014 and then the reality started to hit. It has been nearly a decade since this book was published and there was has been little to no change in our fight against climate change which has started a long time ago. In fact majority of the events in the story seem like they could have happened today or tomorrow which is kind of scary knowing that it’s been many years since we knew of our approaching demise, yet we have not changed at all. As we go deeper and deeper it all the experiences within the story remind me of more recent experiences that we have had. On page 16 where it talks about shutting down the subway system because of a storm, it reminded me of September 29th when there was huge rainfall and caused the entire subway system to shut down. A couple of pages later on page 18 they mention people panic buying and there not being enough stock of certain items for everyone. All of these scenarios that are shown in the story could be seen as predictions of the future if we didn’t change anything about our climate. Unfortunately it seems that we have not changed at all which makes this story all the more relatable as some of these events in the story are so similar to what we have went through that it feels like the novel has predicted everything. In chapter 2, we find out that there is an author that is also trying to write a novel. This is where it started to feel like an autobiography, and that 10:04 is possibly based off of Ben Lerner’s own experiences living in New York. That would help explain the use of very specific locations that exist in our world and also further gives the feeling of familiarity and no change, as someone who has lived in New York for majority of their lives would know and possibly visited these places and have yet to see any of them ever change from the way we know them.