Tag: writing

Yeah, It’s Going to Get Worse

And by worse, I mean a LOT worse for Neil Gaiman fans, as in the aftermath of multiple sexual assault accusations being made, non-fans are going back, reading Gaiman’s work, and observing what was always – and I do mean always – obvious in his work:

Many years ago I bought a huge anthology of Gaiman’s stories. I wasn’t familiar with his work and wanted to give this man a chance. The book collected dust for ages until this week. I had no idea about the allegations when I started reading, but the stories disturbed me enough that I got curious about him and googled. Based on the stories I’m reading so far, I can’t say I’m surprised. I know y’all are huge fans over here, but….has no one noticed how strange his approach to writing women and children is????

I just finished Snow Glass Apples, about a 13 year old girl prostitute vampire that get’s happily r***d by a necrophiliac… He’s very clearly a master storyteller, he didn’t have to go there. He could have easily disturbed us without having to resort to the pedo overtones. But he made the choice to go there. He wanted to. He likes the story better this way.

There are traces of this kind of thing in the stories I’ve read so far – the way the troll in Troll Bridge sniffs at the 15 year old girl’s breasts and crotch. Again, the story was good on it’s own. These details add nothing to the story except to be edgy by sexualizing a very young girl.

It’s not simply about what you write, it’s the way you write about it. There are no shortage of people who were severely put off by my approach to the multicultural interactions portrayed in the prologue to A SEAS OF SKULLS. And due to the way I wrote about it, no one is going to conclude that I am pro-beheading, pro-rape, or pro-crucifixion, although they might correctly conclude that I am not enthusiastic about mass migration.

When, like Neil Gaiman, you’re writing about underage teenage girls and putting them in overtly sexual situations on a regular basis, then drawing a bath for your wife’s young nanny and exposing yourself to her, there is an awful lot of very foul-smelling smoke that lends itself to the conclusion there is a extremely nasty fire burning somewhere in the dark.

Tanith Lee wrote a fair amount of dark sexual material. She also wrote about children from time to time. But what she did not do was combine the two. While what one writes tells the reader a lot about the writer, how one writes tells the reader even more and may even provide some hints as to why.

There are rumors that a big story about Gaiman will be published in mid-January. We’ll see, and we probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything that might be alleged. After all, he managed to convince a surprising number of people that he was “a master storyteller” when he has always been more akin to a deejay doing remixes than an original musician.

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In Which I Agree with Larry Correia

Fandom Pulse quotes The International Lord of Hate’s thoughts on the use of AI in writing fiction. Or rather, the lack of utility thereof.

AI can produce a TON of vapid soulless shit, but hey, so can modern Disney! In fact, when the creator doesn’t give a shit about his art, not only does the audience feel it, the audience gets pissed off. So if you want to produce tons of unenthusiastic shit product and roll the dice hoping it somehow sticks and makes a buck, great. But if you actually give a shit about what you’re saying, then just fucking SAY IT.

The Baen Books author isn’t the only superstar to comment on the topic.

Vox Day is an epic fantasy author and AI music advocate despite writing and recording three Billboard Top 40 Club hits with his techno band in the 1990s. He told Fandom Pulse when we asked his thoughts, “The reason AI text is not a threat to authors the way AI music is a threat to musicians and AI art is a threat to artists is that the amount of vision required for a novel, or even a short story, is orders of magnitude beyond that required for a three-minute pop song or a single 1024 x 1024 image. That’s why a few words are a sufficient prompt for the song or the image, but not for even an obviously inferior short story. Unlike the other AI applications, I haven’t found the various text systems to be a useful tool for producing text of an acceptable quality.”

On tonight’s Darkstream – exclusive to UATV – I’m going to provide a sensory demonstration of what I mean by the way that AI is already a potential replacement for musicians and artists, but cannot even begin to replace authors.

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We’re Already There

I don’t fear AI replacing writing. Especially not on this particular grounds:

“The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well, you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard,” he said in an essay posted on his website last week.

However, the development of technology has allowed people to outsource writing to AI. There’s no longer a need to actually learn how to write, or hire someone to do it for you, or even plagiarize, the English-American scientist wrote.

“I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write,” Graham said.

It’s common for skills to disappear as technologies replace them; after all, “there aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem,” he admitted. But people being unable to write is “bad,” he insisted.

“A world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots,” Graham believes.

We already live in a world that is mostly inhabited by think-nots. Hence MPAI. And there is no reason to fear AI writing, since very few writers produce anything worth reading anyhow. Between Twitter and Facebook, we know that all the erudite theories about “unlocking human potential” were groundless fantasies, since we have conclusive evidence that most people have absolutely nothing to say.

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Exposing the MMC

I’m not surprised that Ron Unz reached much the same conclusion that I did about the Miles Mathis Committee:

The first of my surprises was the sheer volume of his material. I try to be methodical and comprehensive, so I’d originally planned to read his entire corpus of work, but I immediately saw that this was totally impossible unless I was willing to invest many, many months in the project.

His main eponymous website MilesWMathis.com includes an “Update Page” containing links to well over 1,500 of his articles and their updates, of which nearly 1,000 were his new pieces on conspiratorial topics, stretching back to around 2011 or so, with only a small fraction of these being by guest contributors. Spot-checking the word-count on a few of them suggested that they are rarely shorter than 5,000 words and perhaps might average closer to 8,000 words or more. So the total of his conspiratorial writings certainly runs many, many millions of words, with most of those pieces also containing numerous images. He had probably published enough content to fill at least 60 or 70 non-fiction books, certainly an astonishing level of productivity for a single writer.

Indeed, the volume of conspiratorial material on this Mathis website was so enormous that I suspect his aggregate content is far greater than the combined total for every other conspiracy-website on the Internet. Given that huge quantity of writing he even provided a separate archive page listing the 160 conspiratorial articles that he considers his best.

Writing a 5,000 or 10,000 word essay of entirely original text often including copious images and doing that every couple of days or so seems a rather formidable undertaking for a single individual, especially since nearly all of these were apparently based upon extensive Internet research. These essays seem reasonably well written, though usually in his trademark meandering, obfuscating style, and I spotted very few typos, spelling errors, or grammatical mistakes, indicating that they had also been carefully proofed, certainly far more so than the output of a typical website writer.

Furthermore, I soon discovered that he also maintained an entirely separate website called MilesMathis.com, devoted to his mathematical and scientific writing, which includes nearly another 500 articles, supposedly totaling some 7,800 pages of text and perhaps 1.5 million words or more. A little spot-checking suggested that there was only slight overlap with those listed on his main website.

One very odd aspect of his work was that apparently all of the 1,500 or so individual articles on his main website were in the form of PDF files rather than as ordinary HTML pages, and I could think of no other writer nor blogger who followed that approach.

For me, it wasn’t the volume, but rather, the observably different writing styles appearing in the same papers. I personally know and edit two extremely prolific writers, John C. Wright and Chuck Dixon. And there is a fundamental sameness to their writing styles, even across a much wider range of thematic topics, than one sees in the Miles Mathis, JK Rowling, or James Patterson committees. Even books written by a pair of co-writers instead of a single author is usually quite identifiable; for example, if you compare Good Omens to a typical book by either Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman, it’s very easy to not only see that two authors were involved, but to a certain extent, which parts were written by whom.

In the case of the MMC, the painter guy, who has a very good eye for photo fakes, is clearly different than the genealogy guy. The difference is downright jarring when they’re both contributing to the same article. And they’re both different than the history guy, who has a much better grasp on basic history than most writers.

Don’t get me wrong, I genuinely like reading the MMC, regardless of who is running it. The fact is that if you read Miles Mathis, you’ll get far closer to the truth of objective reality than you ever will by reading The New York Times and other news organizations responsible for maintaining the current Narrative. When the mainstream media talks about “misinformation” they are just projecting their own behavior onto others. As the meme has it, “conspiracy theory” is just another word for “sneak preview”.

I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly looking forward to reading the now-inevitable expose about how I am a Swiss intelligence operative descended from a long line of aristocratic British crypto-rabbis who is motivated by pure jealousy of Miles’s luxurious golden ringlets. My connections to Owen Benjamin alone should be sufficient to fill at least two pages of the PDF. Beale/Bâle/Baal. Phoenician Navy confirmed!

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“Only Tolkien is Better”

A very positive review of A SEA OF SKULLS by a reader well-read in epic fantasy.

This was an absolutely PHENOMENAL book from start to finish! Better than the first in the series! The depth of worldbuilding found in here is rivaled only by Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Nobody has yet beaten Tolkien. And in my opinion, nobody ever will. But Day has certainly surpassed Forgotten Realms in depth and has, after this book, surpassed Martin’s work in quality and scope (Even if we’re only considering the first 3 since the last 2 books in ASOIAF are simply nowhere near as good).

To illustrate the caliber of Day’s worldbuilding, I was reading through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn concurrently, which is praised as having some of the greatest worldbuilding of all time! And while Mistborn is justly praised for its really strong worldbuilding, it’s simply nowhere near as good as the Arts of Dark and Light, which has entire cultures, races, religions, even languages fleshed out. “A Sea of Skulls” operates on an entirely different level of depth and complexity. This comparison, though perhaps unfair given the differences in subgenre, highlights the exceptional quality of Day’s work in this regard…

Bottom line: Objectively, this series is already better than “A Song of Ice and Fire” and it will remain that way assuming it doesn’t deviate in quality in a similar manner as Martin’s series did. It’s better than Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, better than Erikson’s Malazan, and somehow even better than Abercrombie’s First Law. The only series better than AODAL is Lord of the Rings, and Vox Day WILL NOT beat Tolkien. It’s not going to happen, BUT… if he keeps this up, he might just find himself moving from “pretty good author” to “one of the greats” territory, alongside writers like Mieville, Stephenson, and Weir.

My chief takeaway from this? We’d better do yet another round of proofreading before we print the interiors of the leather editions. Any volunteers who HAVE NOT proofread it already? It’s always amazing how two different proofreaders can each come up with a list of 100 typos, and only about 20 of them are in common.

However, I will assure the reviewer and anyone else who is interested that all of the major threads can and will be wrapped up in A GRAVE OF GODS. When I was contemplating the possibility of five books, I was not counting Summa Elvetica and I wasn’t sure about how big I was going to make the scope of the series. But after seeing how Martin fell apart and hasn’t been able to complete his, I decided to further discipline my focus and keep the primary series to three books.

In related news, we’ve settled on the names for the four German editions, and Summa Elvetica will be an official part of the series. Two of the translations are already completed and will be released sometime this winter.

  1. Die Seelenlosen
  2. Der Knochenthron
  3. Das Schädelmeer
  4. Das Göttergrab

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Terry Pratchett Knew

He didn’t know right away or he wouldn’t have co-written a book with him. But there’s no question that Terry Pratchett figured out who and what Neil Gaiman was by the time he wrote the Introduction to Good Omens, the book they wrote together. And I don’t think it’s an accident that despite the success of the first book, Pratchett never wrote another one with Gaiman in the 25 years that separated the 1990 publication of that book with Pratchett’s death in 2015.

Remember, Pratchett was a wordsmith, and a much better one than average. And since Gaiman’s reputation has always been one of being “a very nice, approachable guy”, Pratchett is clearly implying that he knows Gaiman is not, but is instead “an incredible actor”. Which events have subsquently confirmed to have been the case. Because that’s the only option that could “come as a surprise to many”.

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Mailvox: An Unhappy Reader

I think it is safe to assume that the emailer was very, very far from what Umberto Eco would describe as my ideal reader.

I was waiting for YEARS to read the next piece of the arts of dark and light series just for it to start with a bloody rape scene. A truly dark and horrific scenario with no heroism or morals what so ever. In true George Rape Rape Martin fashion.

It just disgusts me and It ruined the series for me.

Of course this dark stuff was never left out in your series, but this sledgehammer version of it with no real context, in such a lazy fashion with no true fight and such lame plot justification to force a naked rape to happen.

I stopped as soon as I realised what you were doing and I won’t read it anymore. I waited so long in anticipation and was looking forward for the continuation of one of the only epic fantasy stories I was into.

Fuck you Vox

Sometimes readers understand what an author is doing. Sometimes they don’t. Obviously, this reader’s opinion is as valid as that of any other reader and I don’t take any offense at his reaction, but I will point out that he quite clearly did not realize what I was doing there on any level. Nor is it even remotely correct to characterize the ASOS prologue as having been written without context, in a “lazy fashion”, or with “lame plot justification”. To the contrary, it is there for several very good reasons, among which is the stakes involved. It’s the precise opposite of what George RR Martin does.

If you don’t understand that foreign invasions are horrific things, with catastrophic consequences for women and children as well as for the brave soldiers on the front lines, or if you simply prefer your heroic tales to be a bit more delicate and antiseptic, that’s perfectly fine. But then, I’m not the writer for you. Unlike both Tolkien and Martin, I paint with a full palette of colors, and that palette includes black.

I don’t wallow in it, but neither do I shy away from it, as anyone who has read either Midnight’s War or The Last Closet will know.

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Authors Sue ChatGPT

I’m not privy to the technical details, but based upon what I understand of how AIs are trained and how they work, I suspect the authors have a very strong case against the defendants.

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

AI is a fantastic tool, but just because it allows the less creative and the less talented to better exploit their imaginations, that doesn’t give anyone the right or the permission to tread upon the legal rights of others.

I’m a strong skeptic of copyright, particularly beyond the life of the author, but the fact is that it exists and while neither a title nor a style can be protected, the characters and existing works are. There really isn’t any difference between a human writing a pastiche – like Scalzi did with Old Man’s War or I did with “The Deported” – and an AI-written text that imitates an author’s style. That is, and should be, permissible.

The problem, of course, is that most people aren’t content with that, and they want to cross the line into the theft of the author’s actual characters and storylines. And if the AI manufacturer’s aren’t preventing their tools from being used in that manner, they are clearly complicit in the violations.

Regardless, AI is going to destroy the popular book market for the vast majority of writers. Because no author can compete with an automated book factories of the sort that AI now permits. In fact, we will probably explore creating one ourselves; some incredible and innovate sagas are going to be produced with these new tools.

Amazon is also limiting authors to three new self-published books on Kindle Direct per day, an effort to restrict the proliferation of AI texts.

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CS Lewis was Right

Actually, Clive Staples Lewis was right about many things. But he was especially right about the quality of his friend JRR Tolkien’s work:

‘When I reviewed the first volume of this work, I hardly dared to hope it would have the success which I was sure it deserved. Happily I am proved wrong. There is, however, one piece of false criticism which had better be answered: the complaint that the characters are all either black or white. Since the climax of Volume I was mainly concerned with the struggle between good and evil in the mind of Boromir, it is not easy to see how anyone could have said this. I will hazard a guess. “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” asks someone in Volume II. “As he has ever judged,” comes the reply. “Good and ill have not changed…nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.” (II, 40-41).

This is the basis of the whole Tolkinian world. I think some readers, seeing (and disliking) this rigid demarcation of black and white, imagine they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people. Looking at the squares, they assume (in defiance of the facts) that all the pieces must be making bishops’ moves which confine them to one colour. But even such readers will hardly brazen it out through the last two volumes. Motives, even on the right side, are mixed.

Those who are now traitors usually began with comparatively innocent intentions. Heroic Rohan and imperial Gondor are partly diseased. Even the wretched Smeagol, till quite late in the story, has good impulses; and by a tragic paradox, what finally pushes him over the brink is an unpremeditated speech by the most selfless character of all.

It’s interesting that whereas most people laud Tolkien’s worldbuilding – and rightly so – Lewis recognizes the significance and depth of his friend’s characters. Aragorn and Treebeard and Samwise Gamgee have lasted decades, whereas Harry Potter and Hermione are already being forgotten, because they were magnificently conceived and written.

As for Jon Snow and Tyrion and Arya, they have already been forgotten. About all anyone can remember about Jon Snow is that he knew nothing.

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Guilty as Charged

The sad little freaks on Reddit are claiming that I have used the Gaiman allegations to promote my views. And I suppose that’s true, to a certain extent.

Some prominent TERF and far-right commentators (notably Julie Bindel, Graham Linehan, Vox Day, and Jon Del Arroz; feel free to add more) have used the Gaiman allegations to promote their views. Bindel has even linked to this subreddit. Please scrutinize these sources before sharing them.

And what are these views that I’m promoting? They’re pretty straightforward.

  • Men who sexually assault women should be held accountable, both personally and professionally, for their actions, no matter who they are or how much you like them.
  • Celebrities who abuse and mistreat their fans should be called out and held accountable for their actions. This is especially true of celebrities who happen to have young fans.
  • Neil Gaiman is a literary mediocrity who substitutes research into folklore for genuine originality or creativity. While he has a modicum of writing ability, his primary talent is relentless self-promotion.
  • Neil Gaiman is merely one example of the manufactured “successes” in the publishing industry. John Scalzi is a lesser example. I consider their “success” in selling books to be as genuine as the even greater successes of L. Ron Hubbard, Katie Price, and Hilary Clinton.
  • Terry Pratchett wrote the only funny parts of Good Omens, and despite them it wasn’t a very good book.

I wouldn’t think those views are terribly controversial, given how they are quite easily confirmed, but then, these are people who struggle to discern the difference between a man and a woman.

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