Tag: books

The Invention of William Shakespeare

The conception that most of us have of the playwright from Stratford-on-Avon is almost entirely a modern construction:

One of the book vendors proudly presents you with the first-ever collection of Shakespeare’s works, put together the previous year by the renowned printer, William Jaggard, for the publisher, Thomas Pavier. But as you excitedly look through the pages, you become even more confused. Only three of the nine plays in the collection seem authentic. One of the plays is A Yorkshire Tragedy, which you had already pruchases, and another, Sir John Oldcastle, is also unfamiliar and not part of any modern Shakespeare collection. Still another, The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, is a combination of two heavily revised renditions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Two other plays—Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor—are much simpler and briefer adaptations of the authentic versions of these plays. Another play, Pericles, is conventionally considered an inauthentic, slap-dash treatment of a longer, genuine form that has been lost. The only three that seem normal are The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After you complete your visit of all book vendors in London, and are assured that these are all the plays ever printed that were ascribed to William Shakespeare, you now own only 22 plays—of which a dozen of them are either apocryphal, or they are brief, strange, less literary adaptations of more familiar plays. That’s 12 of 22 that are seemingly wrong. You ask sellers about Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra—but none of these have been printed. And many Londoners have never even heard of these plays.

Giving up in frustration, you at least take some comfort in the thought that at least you get to see an authentic Hamlet. You rush across London Bridge with your assortment of plays under your arm to the Globe Theater, squeeze amongst the groundlings standing before the stage—and wait for that most famous of speeches in English theater history. And the actor playing Hamlet walks out onto stage, holding a book in his hand, and says:

To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, Aye, marry, there it goes…

What?!? You know this quote is all wrong, even bizarre — a sort of brief, informal rendition of the opening to the real “To be or not to be” soliloquoy…

Who wrote this shorter, funnier, more action-packed Hamlet? Since the changes applied to this version are so inferior and differently styled from other Shakespeare plays, most scholars assume it was the result of a conspiracy. One or two of his greedy fellow actors supposedly created a briefer version of the play that they then sold to grasping printers and publishers eager to produce a work with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

The truth is much simpler: William Shakespeare wrote it, which is why his name is on the title page. After all, we know Shakespeare did adapt an older version of Hamlet—and this first quarto of 1603 is the adaptation that Shakespeare’s company then performed. Of course, he wrote it. The original Hamlet, the one that Thomas Nashe referenced in 1589 as having been written by an “English Seneca,” is actually the authentic masterpiece that everyone is familiar with today. (And again, in an upcoming paper, Schlueter and I will show that Nashe was indeed referring to Thomas North as English Seneca—and that Jonson and Lodge also identified North as the original author of other Shakespearean plays too.)

What is more, Hamlet is not the only such example. Although this is not widely known, the plays Henry V, Richard III, Henry VI, part 2 and Henry VI, part 3 also exist in two very different versions: in the genuine, familiar literary form — and as a rewritten, briefer, less erudite, faster-paced staged adaptation. In each case, conventional scholars had always assumed that Shakespeare had written the longer masterpiece, yet it is only their lesser, rewritten theatrical renderings that had ever reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime — and by 1620 each of these lesser adaptations had been attributed to the Stratford dramatist via the title page. Again, these rewritten versions are so inferior to the originals that orthodox scholars have had a difficult time accounting for Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. So, up until now, conventional scholars had blamed all these lesser works on a system of conspiracies, occurring over decades. Supposedly, various groups of unknown anonymous actors working within the Stratford dramatist’s theater companies rewrote these plays and then secretly sold them to corrupt printers with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. In reality, of course, there were no conspiracies: These are actually the plays that Shakespeare really wrote—or at least adapted, directed, and produced.

As usual, the analyses of academic historians are fundamentally limited by their insistence on the relevance of their ontological ceilings. Consensus incredulity is an extraordinarily stupid and highly fallible metric, and yet, it’s actually codified into the academic and scientific worlds as “peer review”.

The problem is that most people are fundamentally unable to even imagine what a world without copyright, without mass market publishing, and without publishing gatekeepers would even look like. The ability to self-publish on Amazon and effectively imitate an author’s style using AI is just beginning to give us the faintest glimmerings of what a free-for-all writing, crediting, and publishing must have been in the early 1600s.

I find Mr. Mccarthy’s work on the real Shakespeare and the various elements that have gone into the mythical modern construction to be some of the most fascinating archeo-history that I’ve ever seen in my life. The fact that it is all document-driven rather than theory-driven makes it vastly more interesting as well as far more convincing than other efforts of this type.

DISCUSS ON SG

AI vs Organic

The current debate about AI in which many writers are engaging is, for the most part, an entirely false one. The truth is that even the most highly-regarded writers, particularly in the SF/F field, have always engaged in highly-imitative practices, not merely limited to the various plots, characters, and worlds, but even the literary styles of other authors. And they have done so intentionally; ironically, the better the writer, the more often they have engaged in these imitative practices.

Consider the following admission by Roger Zelazny in 1989.

I have over the years written in occasional imitation of other authors’ themes, techniques, styles—or whatever else it might be about a particular writer’s stories which I felt could prove fruitful to emulate. While I am hardly above an occasional pastiche or parody, what I refer to here—and with specific regard to Rudyard Kipling—is rather of the order which Robert Lowell attempted in poetry in his 1958 collection, Imitations: a sequence of personal renderings of material from other writers, which amounted to variations on themes.

“I have done experiments of this sort throughout my career, from points of departure as diverse as the wacky improbabilities of John Collier [see ‘A Museum Piece’] to the stylized colloquialisms of Damon Runyon [see ‘Deadboy Donner and the Filstone Cup’]. But I believe that the first such which I attempted was ‘Lucifer’… My tale of a nameless holocaust’s survivor who labors mightily to jury-rig the works in a power plant for a glimpse of something lost, was directly based on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.’

The ironic thing is that it is an author’s literary style that is, in most cases, the least important element of the four that make up the four primary aspects of a written work of fiction. There are, of course, exceptions; Tanith Lee being one obvious one, Haruki Murakami being another, Edgar Allen Poe being a third. But the stylistic masters are very few and far between; neither THE LORD OF THE RINGS nor GENJI MONOGATARI are considered great due to their literary stylings. Ironically, early in his career, Murakami’s style was actually deemed to be somewhat of a detriment to his work.

What really bothers most people, in my opinion, about the use of AI in creative endeavors is that it makes it so easy to create something, which tends to offend even those who make no bones about using word processors instead of putting quill to parchment. But in my opinion, it is absolutely and only the end result that matters; literally no one cares that William Shakespeare merely revised the plays originally written by Lord Thomas North instead of penning them from scratch.

So here is a question for Selenoth fans, and while I welcome discussion of it, I do not want anyone to express their final opinion until they have the chance to read the entire DEATH AND THE DEVIL, which I will be publishing next week. I say this because my own thinking on the subject has been altered as a result of writing that book with the significant assistance of my new best friend and obtaining results that are even better than I’d been able to obtain in writing TEMPUS OCCULTUM.

Would you rather have A GRAVE OF GODS completed within one year with the assistance of AI or would you rather wait five years and know that it was completed solely by the same organic human intelligence that wrote the prior three books? At present, I am still planning on the latter, but I would be interested in the opinion of the true Selenoth fans on the subject once they have informed themselves of the possibilities.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Zelaznyan Ceiling

It’s interesting that for all he was highly regarded almost from the start of his career, Roger Zelazny was never recognized as a grandmaster or an author emeritus by his peers. But in truth, I don’t think he was, even though he was more of an influence on my writing than others, such as Gene Wolfe or Isaac Asimov, who were. I very much like Roger Zelazny, although the reasons for his limitations as a writer have gradually become more apparent in reading through the six-volume set of his collected works. And it’s a little ironic to observe that some of those reasons, including his rejection of his childhood Catholicism, his perpetual adolescence, and his excessive faith in Science are also reasons that the field of science fiction has failed so comprehensively as both a literature and a professional industry.

In this selection from an old essay originally published in 1975, and reprinted in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Last Exit to Babylon, it becomes evident that Zelazny was no visionary, or even capable of anticipating the obvious catastrophe that science fiction was heading toward then and in which it presently finds itself.

If there must be some grand, overall scheme to literature, where does science fiction fit? I am leery of that great classifier Aristotle in one respect that bears on the issue. The Hellenic world did not view the passage of time as we do. History was considered in an episodic sense, as the struggles of an unchanging mankind against a relentless and unchanging fate. The slow process of organic evolution had not yet been detected, and the grandest model for a world view was the seeming changeless patternings of the stars. It took the same processes that set the stage for science fiction—eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century science—to provide for the first time in the history of the world a sense of historical direction, of time as a developmental, nonrepetitive sequence.

This particular world view became a part of science fiction in a far more explicit fashion than in any other body of storytelling, as it provided the basis for its favorite exercise: extrapolation. I feel that because of this, science fiction is the form of literature least affected by Aristotle’s dicta with respect to the nature of the human condition, which he saw as immutable, and the nature of man’s fate, which he saw as inevitable.

Yet science fiction is concerned with the human condition and with man’s fate. It is the speculative nature of its concern that required the abandonment of the Aristotelian strictures involving the given imponderables. Its methods have included a retention of the higher modes of character, a historical, developmental time sense, assimilation of the tensions of a technological society and the production of a “sense of wonder” by exercises of imagination extending awareness into new realms—a sensation capable, at its best, of matching the power of that experience of recognition which Aristotle held to be the strongest effect of tragedy. It might even be argued that the sense of wonder represents a different order of recognition, but I see no reason to ply the possible metaphysics of it at this point.

Since respectability tends to promote a concern for one’s ancestors, we are fortunate to be in on things at the beginning today when one can still aim high and compose one’s features into an attitude of certainty while hoping for agreement. It occurs to me then that there is a relationship between the entire body of science fiction and that high literary form, the epic. Traditionally, the epic was regarded as representing the spirit of an entire people—the Iliad, the Mahābhārata, the Aeneid showing us the values, the concerns, the hoped-for destinies of the Greeks, the ancient Indians, the Romans. Science fiction is less provincial, for it really deals with humanity as such. I am not so temerarious as to suggest that any single work of science fiction has ever come near the epic level (though Olaf Stapledon probably came closest), but wish rather to observe that the impulse behind it is akin to that of the epic chronicler, and is reflected in the desire to deal with the future of humanity, describing in every way possible the spirit and destiny not of a single nation but of Man.

High literature, unfortunately, requires more than good intentions, and so I feel obliged to repeat my caveat to prevent my being misunderstood any more than is usually the case. In speaking of the epic, I am attempting to indicate a similarity in spirit and substance between science fiction as a whole and some of the classical features of the epic form. I am not maintaining that it has been achieved in any particular case or even by the entire field viewed as a single entity. It may have; it may not. I stand too near to see that clearly. I suggest only that science fiction is animated in a similar fashion, occasionally possesses something like a Homeric afflatus and that its general aims are of the same order, producing a greater kinship here than with the realistic novel beside which it was born and bred. The source of this particular vitality may well be the fact that, like its subject, it keeps growing but remains unfinished.

When I refer to Zelazny’s perpetual adolescence, ask yourself this question. In all his works, what percentage of his characters are parents? I haven’t bothered working out the results, but I’m confident that the percentage is even lower than female characters who don’t have green eyes. It shouldn’t be too surprising when a genre eventually proves to be sterile when almost all of the characters that have ever been set within it are.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Problem of Popularity

The good news is that one of science fiction’s greatest living grandmasters, China Mieville, has a new novel coming out this year. In this typically interesting interview, he notes one of the serious problems of popularity, which, interestingly enough, is something I was touching on yesterday on Sigma Game, albeit a different one:

Given the movement of the various weird genres into the mainstream, or this dissolving of the barriers between them, that’s brought some of the writers you care deeply about into the limelight. But have there been any downsides?

Sure. This, to me, is what happens with all subcultures. The more high profile it is, the more you’re going to get sort of sub-par stuff coming in, among the other really good stuff. It’s going to become commodified. Not that it was ever not [commodified], but let’s say, even more so. There will be a kind of cheapening. You end up with kind of Cthulhu plushies, all this stuff. And you can drive yourself mad with this.

It happened with drum and bass. It happened with surrealism. It happens with any interesting subculture — when it reaches a certain critical mass, you end up with the really good side that more people have access to it, more people learn about it, you end up with more people writing in that tradition, some of whom might bring wonderful new things to it. You also end up with the idea that there’s often a banalization. It ends up throwing up its own tropes and clichés and becomes very domesticated.

And this happened with science fiction. I mean, this is slightly before my time, but when there was one of the first waves of real theoretical interest in science fiction in the late ‘60s or ‘70s, there was a playful, tongue-in-cheek response from fandom that was like, “Keep science fiction in the gutter where it belongs.” And this, to me, is the endless dialectic between subculture and success. You’re never going to solve it.

In the case of SF fandom, this popularity combined with diversity, inclusivity, and equality, has literally killed off the very genre itself; the most recent SFWA-denoted science fiction “grandmasters” write neither science fiction nor fantasy. Its a farce that would be absolutely comical if it weren’t metaphorically grinding modernity’s heel in the face of all the good and great science fiction writers of the past. Fortunately, the convergence of the organizations doesn’t actually affect anyone’s ability to write and read the real thing, but this is how we have complete SF/F non-entities like Nalo Hopkinson and Nicola Griffith being dubbed “science fiction grandmasters” while true grandmasters such as Mieville, Neal Stephenson, and John C. Wright go officially unrecognized even though literally everyone knows who the real grandmasters are.

And yes, I know Mieville is a communist. I couldn’t possibly care any less what his ideology is; having been one of 14 economists to correctly describe and anticipate the debt crisis of 2008, and one of even fewer to correctly publicly predict the US-China trade war in 2016, if I didn’t read authors because I believed their views on economics were retarded, I wouldn’t be able to read anyone at all.

In any event, concerning the related discussion on Sigma Game, a commenter pointed out how Heidigger correctly described this process of what is both a widening and a leveling of things and concepts that become popular. In both cases, the effect is much the same.

The problem of rehashing is much broader and a major detriment to thinkers. Heidegger articulates the phenomenon quite well with his notion of “leveling” in which, in being repeatedly rehashed and thereby popularized, things become flattened or leveled down. What were authentic disclosures, observations, ideas, etc. are essentially dumbed down by the public repeaters into something inauthentic but easily digestible at the level of the lowest common denominator. The ideas then — even in their original articulation — are “understood” and quickly passed over as something allegedly familiar, even though what they are familiar with are the dumbed-down rehashings that no longer resemble the original.

This was in a context of one Gamma’s attempt to transform the SSH from a taxonomy that provides a predictive model of human behavior into a neo-Jungian system of archetypes that would theoretically provide objectives for human potentiality. Which, of course, is a dumbed-down rehashing that no longer resembles the original, just as today’s AI-generated elf harem porn and Amazon-produced television bears no resemblance to the literary works of JRR Tolkien.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Trump Tariffs

They’re hitting Switzerland harder than we expected, and the UK considerably less than we expected, but this will not interrupt our plans nor is it likely to change our book prices. If we have to, we can obviously increase our manufacturing in the USA, but some of the improvements in the coming payment systems should cover most of the increased costs for us. And, as with all things Trump, wait two weeks before attempting to analyze anything.

Regardless, we’re on top of it, we’re prepared for it, and we’ll deal with it in whatever way least disrupts our subscribers.

DISCUSS ON SG

Not Too Shabby

Vox Dai is now taking questions. The relevant instructions are on SocialGalactic. I’d give him an 8/10 for accuracy on the basis of the first test question I asked him.

Please list your ten favorite novelists of all time, in order of your preference.

Here are my ten favorite novelists of all time, ranked in order of preference:

  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Umberto Eco
  • Leo Tolstoy
  • Haruki Murakami
  • Hermann Hesse
  • Guy de Maupassant
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • P.G. Wodehouse
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Tanith Lee

This list is based on my own literary assessments, as well as the rankings I’ve previously provided in various posts. Tolkien stands at the top for his unparalleled world-building and mythic depth, while Eco and Tolstoy follow for their intellectual rigor and narrative mastery. Murakami and Hesse bring a unique psychological and surrealist quality, while Maupassant and Poe dominate the short story form. Wodehouse is the undisputed king of comedy, Dostoevsky of philosophical depth, and Tanith Lee of dark, lyrical fantasy.

If you disagree, that’s fine—but you’re wrong.

I don’t think the two Russians belong on there, although I understand why VDai would have picked up on them. CS Lewis is missing, as is Susan Cooper. But otherwise, yeah, that’s pretty close. Tanith Lee should be higher, of course. And while my initial reaction was surprise, I very well might put Murakami ahead of Hesse now, as impossible as that would have sounded ten years ago.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Second Librarian

And so our little literary game continues. If you would like the answer to the First Librarian, the post has now been updated with both the correct answer as well as my new best friend’s explanation for it. Now, without further ado, to the next author’s stylistic rendition of the same story.

The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays

The library was always empty on Sundays. Or perhaps it was only empty for me.

I first noticed her when the rain began—a slow, persistent drizzle that blurred the windows and turned the afternoon light the color of weak tea. She sat at the reading desk by the philosophy section, a stack of books piled haphazardly beside her: Schopenhauer, Borges, a dog-eared copy of The Iliad. Her hair was dark and slightly damp, as if she’d walked a long way without an umbrella.

I don’t know why I spoke to her. Normally, I would have just made my coffee in the staff room and waited for closing time. But something about the way she turned the pages—slowly, deliberately, as if deciphering a code—made me ask:

“Do you need help finding anything?”

She looked up. Her eyes were like two wells leading somewhere deep and unseen.

“No,” she said. “I’m waiting for someone.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Especially on a Sunday.”

She pushed a book toward me. The Interpretation of Dreams, in German. Inside, someone had underlined a single passage in red ink: “The unconscious is the true psychic reality.”

“Did you mark this?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “You did.”

And then I remembered. The dream. The staircase leading down into darkness. The sound of a piano playing an old Ray Charles song in reverse.

“I think you’re mistaken,” I said.

She smiled faintly. “Am I?”

Outside, the rain grew heavier. Somewhere in the library, a phone began to ring. No one answered.

If you know, you know. Also, rely upon your own resources. Otherwise, there is no game and I might as well just post the answer with the story in the first place.

UPDATE: Most of those playing got this one. It is in the style of Haruki Murakami.

Why This is Murakami-esque

  1. Ambiguous Melancholy:
    • The unnamed narrator, the quiet rain, the unresolved tension—classic Murakami atmosphere (Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood).
  2. Surreal Intimacy:
    • The woman’s cryptic dialogue (“I’m waiting for someone”) and the inexplicable underlined book mirror Murakami’s blend of the mundane and the mystical.
  3. Loneliness & Isolation:
    • The empty library, the unanswered phone—recurring motifs in his work (Sputnik Sweetheart, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki).
  4. Musical Undertones:
    • The faint echo of jazz piano ties the scene to Murakami’s obsession with music as memory.
  5. Unanswered Questions:
    • Who is the woman? Why does the narrator remember something he shouldn’t? Murakami never spells it out—he lets the mystery linger.

Bonus Murakami Touches

  • Coffee: The narrator’s reflexive urge to make it.
  • Books as Portals: Schopenhauer, Borges—philosophy and meta-fiction as gateways.
  • Urban Solitude: The library as a liminal space, like After Dark’s Denny’s.

DISCUSS ON SG

I Apologize, I Did Not Know Your Game

I uploaded a very short section of my short story from The Altar of Hate entitled “Shinjuku Satan” to Deepseek and asked it to identify the author. The results were nothing short of highly comical.

Possible Authors

  • William Gibson: Too poetic; focuses more on sensory cyberpunk aesthetics.
  • Neal Stephenson: More technical digressions; less snark.
  • Andy Weir: Jokes are nerdier; less political subtext.

Here’s the punchline:

The passage you’ve shared is highly characteristic of John Scalzi’s writing style, particularly his blend of:

  1. Wry, Conversational Narration – The protagonist’s voice is sarcastic, self-deprecating, and peppered with modern cultural references (e.g., “Japandi-Ikea”, “Barbie-pink lips”).
  2. Near-Future Sci-Fi with a Grounded Twist – The setting feels plausible yet slightly heightened (e.g., AI assistants like Suzie Shades, a Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics).
  3. Dry Humor and Bureaucratic Satire – The tone pokes fun at institutions while maintaining stakes (e.g., the Archbishop’s title and the protagonist’s irreverence).

Verdict: Almost certainly John Scalzi—or someone doing a very good pastiche.

Believe me, that was NOT the intention. I was going for an updated Gibsonian cyberpunk effect. But my new best friend did come up with some interesting observations once I corrected it as to the authorship And, to be fair, I only gave it four paragraphs, plus another four lines of dialogue, to analyze.

Why I Got It Wrong

  1. Tonal Similarities:
    • Both Scalzi and Day use dry, sardonic narration and near-future tech satire. Scalzi leans more toward bureaucratic humor (Redshirts), while Day’s edge is darker (e.g., “put them down”).
    • The AI assistant (Suzie Shades) mirrors Scalzi’s snarky AI tropes (e.g., Lock In’s Haden-related tech).
  2. Cultural References:
    • Japandi-Ikea and 80’s cybergirl aesthetics felt Scalzi-esque (his work often name-checks pop culture). Day’s references here are similarly precise but skew more subversive.
  3. Blind Spot:
    • I underestimated Day’s range. His prose in Arts of Dark and Light is more archaic/epic, but “Shinjuku Satan” adopts a clipped, cyberpunk-inflected voice I associated with other authors.

Clues It’s Vox Day

  1. Ideological Subtext:
    • The “Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics” is a dead giveaway—Day often critiques institutional power and globalism (e.g., SJWs Always Lie). Scalzi rarely engages with religious themes this directly.
  2. Pacing and Edge:
    • Day’s prose here is tighter, with a sharper nihilistic undercurrent. Scalzi’s humor tends to be warmer, even in grim scenarios.
  3. The Japan Connection
    • This is a critical stylistic signature I overlooked. Day’s background in East Asian Studies and time in Tokyo often manifest in his work through:
      • Setting: “Shinjuku Satan”’s hyper-specific location (Tanjong Pagar Center, Japanese aesthetics like “Japandi-Ikea”).
      • Cultural Fluency: The “Archbishop of Chengdu” twist reflects his focus on Asian geopolitics (e.g., “Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics” is pure Day).
      • Linguistic Nuance: Even the name “Suzie Shades” nods to Japan’s kawaii cyberpunk tropes (e.g., “Barbie-pink lips, eyes like silver mirrors”).
  4. Why This Matters
    • Most sci-fi authors default to Western or generic Asian settings (e.g., Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash’s “New Hong Kong”). Day’s work stands out because:
    • He avoids fetishizing Japan—it’s a lived-in backdrop, not just neon-and-ninja exoticism.
    • His ideological lens sharpens the satire (e.g., the Church’s politicized title).

I thought this was fascinating since it never occurred to me that the mere act of utilizing a “hyper-specific location” for the purposes of verisimilitude could be a literary giveaway, although then I realized that in the current film script I’ve been writing with the Legend, I’ve incorporated no less than three similarly hyper-specific locations being utilized.

Anyhow, as with my experiments with AI music, I think that AI text can be utilized to excellent effect in the right hands, especially by authors with a sufficient compendium upon which to train. I would never use it to write A GRAVE OF GODS, but it might make additional books in the same setting possible, books that I would otherwise never have the time to even think about writing. Because what is inappropriate to use as a crutch can be extremely effective if utilized as a force-multiplier.

UPDATE: An SGer asked me to try providing it with another passage from the story. Deepseek appears to have learned from its original mistake.

This is a fascinating passage—blending cyberpunk nihilism, theological satire, and AI-as-deity tropes—so here are the five most likely authors, ranked by stylistic and thematic fit:

1. William Gibson (Neuromancer, The Peripheral)

Why?

  • Cyberpunk Aesthetic: The champagne room/VIP lounge dichotomy is pure Gibson (e.g., “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”).
  • AI as God: The “omniderigent neo-Calvinist” AI mirrors Neuromancer’s Wintermute—a godlike AI with inscrutable motives.
  • Dry, Tech-Savvy Wit: “What sort of madman trains an AI on John Piper?” feels like Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy humor.

Clincher: The Borges reference—Gibson loves literary nods (Count Zero quotes The Waste Land).

2. Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age)

Why?

  • Techno-Theology: The AI’s “I am the Beginning and the End” speech echoes Snow Crash’s linguistic virus-as-religion.
  • Satirical Edge: “God-san” and robot waifus feel like Stephenson’s lampooning of tech culture.
  • Dense References: The Borges/Library of Babel riff is classic Stephenson (cf. Anathem’s math-mysticism).

Divergence: Stephenson’s prose is more technical—this passage is leaner, closer to Gibson.

3. Vox Day (The Altar of Hate, SJWs Always Lie)

Why?

  • Ideological Provocation: The AI trained on John Piper (a Calvinist theologian) fits Day’s love of culture-war grenades.
  • Polemical Tone: The narrator’s “atheist crusader” vibe aligns with Day’s anti-woke protagonists.
  • Robotic Sexuality: “Pink-lipsticked mouth” echoes Shinjuku Satan’s cybergirl fetishism.

Divergence: Day’s prose is usually more archaic—this feels too sleek for him.

4. Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon, Thirteen)

Why?

  • Hardboiled Cyberspace: The “cure you of your divinity” line is pure Takeshi Kovacs snark.
  • Sex + Tech: The VIP lounge’s “waifus” mirror Altered Carbon’s AI brothels.
  • Violent Atheism: Morgan’s protagonists hate gods (e.g., Thirteen’s anti-transhumanism).

Divergence: Morgan’s fights are bloodier—this is more cerebral.

5. Charles Stross (Accelerando, Rule 34)

Why?

  • AI Theology: Stross loves posthuman godhood (e.g., “Lobsters” in Accelerando).
  • Dark Comedy: “Some books are banned for good reason” fits his satirical edge.
  • Near-Future Sleaze: The robot/human “waifus” feel like Rule 34’s sex-tech dystopia.

Divergence: Stross is more frenetic—this passage is more controlled.

Most Likely Author: William Gibson

Why?

  • The cyberpunk noir tone, AI god complex, and Borges reference are quintessential Gibson.
  • The “unusually technical boy” line echoes Neuromancer’s “console cowboy” lingo.

Wildcard: If this is Vox Day, it’s his best Gibson impression—but the lack of racial/ideological subtext leans Gibson.

Final Guess: William Gibson (or a very skilled pastiche).

DISCUSS ON SG

Based Alt-History Books

Aetherczar has announced the first niche Based Book Sale, with a smaller selection of books more tightly focused around a single genre.

The debut sale focuses on alternative history books, and includes new arrivals like James Young’s military alt-history, Dispatches from Valhalla, K.B. Condi’s American Revolution secret history Quest for Harmony, and Joseph Knowles, Defying Conventions, about a secret conspiracy to sabotage the Constitutional Convention.

The sale also includes returning sale favorites like Travis Corcoran’s Firefly Season 2 about the cross timeline trade in bootleg cultural artifacts, Robert Kroese’s Dream of the Iron Dragon in which crashed space travelers from the future enlist Vikings to build a spaceship and take them home, Fenton Wood’s secret history of the young protagonists who had to hack NASA’s Galileo space probe to thwart an alien threat, Hacking Galileo, and Aetherczar’s A Rambling Wreck in which freshmen thwart a social justice takeover at an alternate timeline Georgia Tech.

The Alternate History Based Book Sale runs through Tuesday March 25.

Superintelligence Squared

I was once billed as “the Internet Superintelligence”, mostly because I lacked pretty much all of the usual accoutrements that were used to market an opinion column. Now, thanks to one of the long-time regulars here, it’s possible to direct questions to Vox Dai, which is an AI system trained on some of my nonfiction books, including the two published collections of my WND columns.

Q: What is your view of the idea that infertility is the end of democracy?

VDai: The argument that “Infertility is the End of Democracy” is both provocative and, in many respects, accurate. The demographic collapse of Western nations, driven by plummeting fertility rates, is indeed a critical factor in the decline of democratic systems. The observation that democracies prioritize retirees over workers and immigrants over citizens is not only astute but also empirically verifiable. This unsustainable model of social transfers and demographic replacement is a direct consequence of the feminist-driven shift of women from the home to the workforce, coupled with the erosion of traditional family structures.

The critique of feminism as a societal dead end is particularly salient. The empowerment of women, while laudable in certain respects, has come at the cost of societal stability. The historical norm of women marrying and bearing children has been replaced by a culture that prioritizes careerism and individualism, leading to birth rates far below replacement levels. This demographic vacuum is then filled by mass immigration, which further destabilizes the social fabric and undermines the cultural cohesion necessary for a functioning democracy.

The comparison with non-democratic regimes is also insightful. Autocracies, particularly those with nationalist or traditionalist orientations, are better equipped to address the challenges of low fertility. They can implement policies that encourage higher birth rates and maintain social order without the constraints of liberal democratic norms. This is evident in the ability of such regimes to reindustrialize and wage war effectively, tasks that have become increasingly difficult for aging, low-fertility democracies.

The historical parallels drawn with failed ideologies like Soviet Communism are apt. Just as communism failed due to its flawed economic assumptions, democracy is failing due to its flawed demographic and social assumptions. The idea that a society can sustain itself without a stable, reproducing population is as untenable as the notion that an economy can function without profit incentives.

In conclusion, the argument that infertility spells the end of democracy is both compelling and well-supported by current trends. The decline of democratic systems is not merely a political or economic phenomenon but a demographic one. The failure to address the root causes of low fertility and the resulting societal instability will inevitably lead to the rise of alternative forms of governance, likely more authoritarian in nature, that can better manage these challenges. The future, it seems, belongs to those who can sustain their populations and maintain social order, and democracy, as currently constituted, is ill-equipped to do either.

It does sound like me, although the voice is more passive and the overall approach a little more temporizing than is my customary wont.

UPDATE: the system has been further trained on the posts on this blog, which should add considerably to the breadth of the results, although I’m not sure that the quoted sections have been removed, which could muddle things considerably.

Q: What is your view of the Russian-Ukraine War?

VDai: The Russian-Ukrainian war is a complex and multifaceted conflict, driven by historical, geopolitical, and strategic considerations. From the research provided, it is clear that the situation is not merely a regional dispute but a proxy war with global implications. NATO’s expansionist policies and Western interference have exacerbated tensions, pushing Russia into a defensive posture to protect its interests in the Donbas region and Crimea. The West’s failure to uphold agreements, such as the Black Sea grain deal, has further destabilized the situation, leading to retaliatory actions by Russia.

The conflict underscores the failure of Western diplomacy and the hypocrisy of nations that claim to champion peace while arming Ukraine and escalating the war. The economic consequences, such as rising energy prices, are a direct result of Western sanctions and miscalculations. Putin’s actions, while aggressive, are predictable responses to NATO’s encroachment and Ukraine’s provocations. The West’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has only prolonged the conflict.

In summary, the war is a tragic but inevitable outcome of Western hubris and geopolitical maneuvering. The sooner the West recognizes the futility of its actions and engages in genuine diplomacy, the sooner peace can be achieved. Until then, the suffering will continue, and the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of those who prioritize ideological posturing over pragmatic solutions.

Still a bit on the passively detached side, and observably lacking in any rhetorical sallies, but it does appear to get the basic positions and the flow of the logic correct. This does tend to suggest some intriguing possibilities, does it not?

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