Marcel Moring is a novelist. His work has been published in eighteen countries and has won numerous awards.

Some intellectuals like to think in terms of eras. We’ve had *The End of History*, the book in which Francis Fukuyama argued in 1992 that humanity had reached the point where it was clear that liberal democracy was the zenith of our development. The autocratic leaders of our time do not agree with him. We have had the Anthropocene, which means that humanity’s impact on the Earth is just as profound as that of geological forces in other geological eras. And not so long ago, I heard an American intellectual claim that we are living in the post-literary era, in which writing has become obsolete as a means of preserving and transmitting knowledge. Thinking in terms of eras provides perspective. It creates the illusion that we can at least recognise the chaos of life, and perhaps even understand it.

For me, too, an era is coming to an end. At the start of this century, I submitted my first piece to *De Ingenieur*. It was about a small cap stone that didn’t work, because IKEA, in its infinite wisdom, had decided it could be improved. Which wasn’t the case. Now, 260 columns later, we are parting ways. De Ingenieur is heading towards a new future, with a different publisher and a different team.

Over the past seventeen years, I’ve occasionally bumped into you out and about. You’ve sent emails, and on the odd occasion a letter. Just last week, when I was being fitted with new hearing aids, the audiologist mentioned that her husband read my columns in *De Ingenieur *. ‘He’s a proper nerd,’ she said fondly.

I don’t believe this magazine is for nerds, though I’ll readily admit that I fit that description. *De Ingenieur* is a magazine for readers who understand that our world is a man-made world and that this creation is a matter of human endeavour. You could even say that this is one of our most fundamentally human characteristics, that our success as a species is explained by the engineer within us. That, as far as I’m concerned, is what De Ingenieur is all about, and that’s why, as a writer, I felt right at home amongst the stories about biogas plants, sensors and water management. Now that the physical challenges in our man-made world are increasing – drought, water shortages, AI, wars – *De Ingenieur* is more relevant than ever. My predecessor in this role was Rudy Kousbroek, one of the leading essayists of his time and, like me, someone who did not fit the cliché of the arts graduate for whom the world of the sciences is a sort of no-man’s-land. The fact that there was a room within De Ingenieur where writers could feel at home says something about the magazine. It is a publication that has always been open to society. And rightly so, because that society is shaped by creators of all kinds – arts and sciences, minds and hands, and vice versa. I have written about this regularly over the past 25 years because that cross-pollination seemed to me to be of the utmost importance.

Often, when I was writing my monthly column, other people were on my mind. Above all, Gerrit Krol, the P.C. Hooft Prize-winning author who incorporated so much technology into his books. Krol wrote about technology in our world as if it were just as natural a backdrop to the story as the Amsterdam canals. There aren’t many writers left who do that. All sorts of things are claimed about engineering and technology, but rarely with any real understanding of the subject. On the contrary, technology seems to be increasingly viewed as the cause of all manner of calamities. No one would deny that this side of technology exists, but it would be nice if more people also recognised that without technology we would not be who we are today, nor where we are today.

Krol’s collected poems were published under the title *Industry Cures All Suffering*. As this is poetry, we can assume he did not mean this literally. Yet there is a grain of truth in that title.

Human beings are capable of unexpected things, both in a positive and a negative sense. We make mistakes and we put things right again. We cause problems and we devise solutions for them. Sometimes we even devise solutions for problems that do not yet exist. That is what it means to be human, and you have been able to read about it in this magazine since 1886. I hope that my articles over the past quarter of a century have contributed to that in some small way.