Tag: writing

DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN

You know a book is good if your wife keeps asking what you’re laughing at. The answer was this book. It is funny, it is really funny. And the ending will leave a tear in your eye.

“What’s so funny there?”
she whispers through the lamplight
as he grins and reads

You’ll understand the haiku if you read the book.

A review of DEATH AND THE DEVIL.

DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN

It is a well-established fact across most of the known multiverse that death is, generally speaking, the end of life. This is the sort of obvious statement that most beings understand intuitively, in the same way they understand that water is wet or that the likelihood of autocorrect humiliating you increases exponentially with the importance of the message being sent.

What is rather less well-established is what happens immediately after death, in that awkward period between the cessation of biological functions and whatever comes next. This is primarily because most beings who experience death are, by definition, no longer in a position to write detailed reports about it, and those who claim to have had “near-death experiences” typically experience something more akin to “near-near-death” or “death-adjacent” moments, which is rather like claiming to be an expert on the history of Paris because your plane once flew over the south of France.

Dr. Mortimer Finch, professor of evolutionary biology at the prestigious University of West Anglia, had spent his entire fifty-seven-year academic career insisting that death was merely the natural conclusion of a biological process, a physical event no more spiritually significant than the shedding of a snake skin or the molting of an upwardly mobile crab. The universe, Dr. Finch maintained, was a magnificent accident—an unplanned, undirected series of chemical and physical processes that, through billions of years of trial and error, had produced everything from slime molds to symphony orchestras.

This conviction had served him well throughout his distinguished career, earning him numerous academic accolades, a comfortable tenure, and the quiet disdain of the university’s theology department, whose offices were, perhaps not coincidentally, located in the building on the opposite side of the campus.

It was therefore somewhat disconcerting for Dr. Finch to one day find himself face-to-face with Death.

Not with the abstract concept of death about which he had lectured about so confidently to generations of undergraduates. Not with the cessation of metabolic functions, the breakdown of cellular integrity, and the dispersal of organized energy into entropy. No, this was Death with a capital D, complete with a flowing black robe, a gleaming scythe, and a skull that somehow managed to express mild interest despite having no facial muscles whatsoever.

“This is obviously a hallucination,” Dr. Finch declared, adjusting his spectacles out of habit, despite the fact that they were now as spectral as the rest of him. “A final neurochemical discharge as my brain shuts down. Quite fascinating, really.”

Death regarded him with eye sockets that contained tiny silver points of light where eyes might have been expected.

I AM NOT A HALLUCINATION, Death said in a voice that wasn’t so much heard as felt, as if it was the final note of a funeral dirge played on the bones of the universe.

“That’s exactly what a hallucination would say,” Dr. Finch replied with the confident tone of a man who had won numerous academic debates through sheer force of authoritative pronunciation. “My brain, in its oxygen-deprived state, is creating a culturally recognizable figure to help process the fact that I’m dying. You’re a psychological construct, nothing more.”

Death sighed, a sound like a desert wind whistling through ancient tombs. Dr. Finch’s reaction was not an uncommon one. Humans, in particular, had a remarkable capacity for maintaining a state of denial even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It was one of their most distinctive traits, ranking just behind opposable thumbs and just ahead of their inexplicable insistence on keeping pets that were either venomous, temperamental, or both.

YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD, Death clarified, pointing a bony finger at Dr. Finch’s body, which was currently cooling on the laboratory floor beside an overturned stool and a half-eaten tuna sandwich. YOUR HEART STOPPED SEVENTEEN SECONDS AGO. CEREBRAL ACTIVITY CEASED FOURTEEN SECONDS AGO. YOU ARE NOT HALLUCINATING. YOU ARE, BY EVERY SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION, DECEASED.

Dr. Finch glanced at his body with mild interest, as if observing a moderately engaging museum exhibit.

“Cardiac arrest, by the look of it. I always suspected it would be the heart. Too many late nights in the lab, too much caffeine.” He turned back to Death. “But this conversation is still taking place inside my dying mind. I’m talking to myself. This is some sort of complex psychological self-delusion, probably the result of seeing my mother in the bathtub when I was five years old or something like that.”

Death’s patience, which had been cultivated over eons of existence, began to show its first microscopic signs of wear.

DISCUSS ON SG

On Satire and the Understanding Thereof

As a general rule, a person too stupid to understand satire shouldn’t try to use it as an affirmative defense.
—John Scalzi, July 20, 2013

Now, obviously I understand satire, and one would have thought the satirical nature of my response to McRapey’s hilarious ode to rape was sufficient evidence of that. But since I am never one to forgo the beating of dead horses, even the unnecessary beatings of equines long since deceased, allow me to present further evidence, conclusive evidence, of my grasp of the art of satire.

As you can see, I do not merely grasp the art of satire, I am observably a best-selling satirist, right up there with Juvenal and, apparently, someone by the name of Freida McFadden who would appear to sell a lot more books than me, Juvenal, and John Scalzi combined.

However, DEATH AND THE DEVIL isn’t just satire. It’s also litricha, as is demonstrated by the appearance of my name in between literary immortals Salman Rushdie on the one hand and the late David Foster Wallace on the other in the Literary Short Stories category.

So, if anyone needs me, I’ll just be here in my library, wearing a velvet robe, smoking a pipe, and contemplating my next public pontification for the semi-literate masses. Although, deep in my contemplations, a terrible thought struck me. What if the rightful heir to Terry Pratchett’s SF humorist throne is not, as some have suggested, Jasper Fford, but rather, Vox Day?

Or, as is more precisely the case, Vox Dai?

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Creativity Divide

The Band contemplates the ways in which AI will continue to separate the sheep from the goats in creating a creativity divide.

The notion users really need to know what they’re doing holds the mirror to useless modern busyworkers. If you can be replaced by a flawed talking search engine, what was your true value add? Butit also holds a mirror of me, the user. Note how my answer to it up above used the phrase “outsourcing the whole chain of thought”. Shortly after, DeepSeek describes the…

Passivity Trap: Why struggle to write, code, or analyze when AI can do a “good enough” job? The entire chain of thought can be outsourced.

This is one example. It commonly asks me questions, adopts my own wording, and gives it back to me. This makes it seem more agreeable and complementary. It’s excellent for augmented intelligence. As it adapts to your patterns, it is more able to anticipate your needs. But it makes NPCs feel smart. Not because they are. Because it’s a mirror on every level.

As for the elite/mass cognitive split that I think is likely, DeepSeek says it’s already happening with AI use. It explained what it calls a Creativity Divide between people who use AI for brainstorming vs. those who treat it as a final authority. It’s connected to critical thinking and that circles back to NPC. “Elite” thinking is what we’ve been discussing in these chats. RI. Real Intelligence. Users who understand and think well enough to run the AI. Catching errors, pushing fallacies, and designing the right queries and prompts. DeepSeek summed it up like this while throwing some shade at the competition.

Elites cross-examine AI outputs; masses accept them as gospel (see: ChatGPT-generated misinformation spreading uncritically).

And the economic impact is just as harshly divided. High-functioning workers will use AI in the right places to augment their productivity. Low-functioning workers get replaced. It’s not surprising. This split is always with us. It’s part of the human condition. Readers and non-readers. Learners and CLI. AI is a mirror. The divided use patterns with it reflect the FTS division with pretty much everything. What it does is sharpen it.

We’re about to hit this in a big way in the music industry. While most of the outspoken musicians are posturing angrily and preaching about the AI apocalypse, the smarter ones are quietly mastering the AI tools and using them to produce better results. This creativity divide is going to become increasingly obvious as soon as the middle of next year.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Charlatan’s Veil

Another Gaiman fan realizes that his literary hero was never all that good in the first place.

Gaiman’s approach to fantasy is a bit shallow. What I’m trying to say here is that Gaiman has a talent for creating mood pieces, but beyond that, his work falls apart.

For example, his stories often unfold as tableaux of strange and evocative moments: a forgotten god hitchhiking through America, a girl wandering into a mirror-world, a dream king brooding over his endless domain. These scenes are drenched in mythic suggestion, as if each image wants to convey some timeless meaning. But if you step through it, you often find he idea of profundity rather than the thing itself. His imagination operates like a collage: history, folklore, and pop culture are cut and pasted together to form something instantly atmospheric, yet curiously weightless. You can clearly see this in many of this Sandman tales: they have a strong opening/hook, but the ending is like “wasn’t that totally random fantastic happenstance neat?” And that’s pretty much it.

Part of the issue is that Gaiman’s relationship to myth feels archival rather than interpretive. He borrows freely from Norse sagas, biblical apocrypha, and fairy tales, but mostly to signal that we are in the presence of something “meaningful.” Rarely does he twist those sources into new psychological or philosophical insight. For example, this can be clearly seen in Season of Mists: The gathering of gods from different cultures is amusing and humorous, but if you look back upon it, the only real depth the whole storyline had was allusiveness. The gods were nothing beyond amusing or humorous curiosities. He’s a curator of myths, not a renovator of them. His most powerful tool is the reader’s own cultural memory; he relies on our preexisting reverence for myth to supply the emotional depth his narratives often lack.

If you strip away the mythic coating and what remains is often a rather simple moral fable or an exercise in mood: a cliched story about the endurance of stories, or the melancholy of immortality, or the faint shimmer of magic behind the mundane. It’s not that these are unworthy themes, but that they are presented through affection rather than argument. It’s basically “style over substance”. The result is fiction that feels “trippy” and profound in the moment, but evaporates upon reflection, leaving behind little more than a pleasant aftertaste of mystery.

Of course, he has certain gifts as a writer. He has a very good ear for rhythm (his prose is a goldmine for making pleasant audiobooks), a flair for genuinely striking imagery, and a knack for making the strange feel intimate. But too often, his fantasy reads like a spell cast for its own beauty, a shimmer of enchantment that delights the senses while concealing the absence of real substance beneath. His worlds are wondrous, yes, but their wonder tends to circle back on itself, never quite touching the ground of genuine insight.

He’s absolutely right. Neil Gaiman isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad or untalented writer. But he’s barely a good writer and he isn’t anywhere close to the great one that his fans, his publishers, and his press once would have had everyone believe. He’s always been a 7/10 in my book, and I’d drop that a point to 6/10 in light of his shameless ripoffs of other, much better writers, by far the most egregious and disgusting being the short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” which doesn’t even attempt to hide its overt imitation of Tanith Lee’s much better “Red as Blood”.

Ironically, although “Snow, Glass, Apples” is supposedly significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page, that page rather gives away the game with its “See Also” reference to the page about Tanith Lee’s short story collection, of which “Red as Blood” is the titular story.

But as manufactured creatures go, at least Gaiman did possess an amount of talent which he utilized to reasonable effect before he devoted himself to playing the public part of an Important Author and what is alleged to be his tubcuddling hobby.

The amusing thing is the way in which the fans pretend that Gaiman being off wasn’t always obvious to the sufficiently observant.

It’s annoying how some act like they’re these know it all sages, like they were always a few steps ahead of everyone else. Saying they always knew he was a sicko in real life based on the topics he wrote about. If they really knew, why didn’t they say something sooner, instead of showing up after the damage is done?

They did. But they were shouted down by fans who refused to either listen or see the obvious for themselves.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Sonnets Revealed

Fresh from conclusively proving that Thomas North is the true author of William Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays, Dennis McCarthy is now tackling the authorship of the Sonnets.

Over the last two centuries, and especially in recent decades, we have made astonishing progress in biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, technology–in all fields of intellectual inquiry—except for Shakespeare studies. And while, yes, most of you reading this do know the origin of the plays, the First Folio, Ben Jonson’s Ode, etc., have now been answered. But there’s still another origin story that I have avoided till now: the Sonnets.

First, consider how strange it is we know so little about them. Shakespeare is the most well researched figure in literary history, and he has written the most oft-analyzed sequence of poems. Yet out of his 154 sonnets, we still have not discovered the addressee of a single one. New books appear every few years raising swords before new candidates. Some have declared them inscrutable; others have dismissed them as mere literary exercises. To put this in perspective: while we have solved the origin of life, cured bacterial infections, invented computers, detected gravitational waves, imaged black holes, landed robots on Mars, unraveled the genetic code for life, and are at the dawn of AGI, we still have no idea whom the world’s most famous poet was comparing “to a summer’s day.” We still don’t know whose eyes were “nothing like the sun.”

But shouldn’t all our new information-tech be able to help here? Can’t our new inventions finally illuminate the identities of the subjects of the world’s most famous poems? Of course, they can, and they have. The dates and the purpose of the sonnets, as well as the identities of the Dark Lady, the Fair Youth, and the Rival Poet have now finally been solved—as have the identities of other subjects of the poems that no one suspected.

I have no opinion on the sonnets, except to say that I have always doubted that all of them were authored by the author of the plays. They simply never struck me as written by the same individual. But I would characterize that as more of an impression than an opinion, it’s certainly never been something I’ve been inclined to suggest, let alone defend.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Fictional Western

Morgan posted an interesting history of the fictional Western at Arkhaven:

The American fictional western arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century with the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian in 1902. The novel created the archetype of the cowboy as hero. The western story quickly became the mythic literature of the recently closed American frontier. A popular genre in the hands of Zane Gray, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Frederick Faust (“Max Brand”) to name a few in the legion of western fictioneers in the form of novels, pulp magazines, and later mass-market paperback books. If J. R. R. Tolkien attempted to create a mythology for England, the western writers created a mythology for the United States of America. Many stories had a setting vaguely late 19th Century time and place. Frederick Faust best known as “Max Brand” often set his stories in an undefined “mountain desert.” He used myths and epics as the plot basis for many of his westerns. Faust’s Hired Guns adapted the Iliad for example.

The western genre was a large part of the pulp magazine market from 1920 to the 1950s, possibly having the majority share. Some pulp fiction writers could be described as generalists, they wrote in various genres. Will F. Jenkins as “Murray Leinster” could be found in the pages of Cowboy Stories, Astounding Stories, Clues Detective, and “Swords and Mongols” in Golden Fleece. Frederick Faust wrote historical adventure under the “George Challis” for Argosy magazine in the 1930s. Faust had the Tizzo series set in the time of Renaissance Italy during the time of Cesare Borgia. He also had the pirate novel “The Naked Blade” in Argosy. Those swashbucklers would later be reprinted in paperback form decades later. At the same time, he was writing spy stories as “Frederick Frost.”

The fictional western story underwent the transformation during and after World War II that had earlier taken place with the detective story as written by Dashiell Hammett. The writing became leaner and more historically accurate. The protagonists were morally ambiguous men (and women) who had lived hard lives. Les Savage Jr. was a pioneer with a hard-boiled presentation coupled with a setting of 1820 to the1850s. The indistinct time and place of the mythic western gave way to the historical western.

Read the whole thing there. I will say that while I’m not a huge Louis L’Amour fan, I very much liked FAIR BLOWS THE WIND. Which, of course, isn’t a Western, but does set the stage for a series of them.

DISCUSS ON SG

No, You Cannot Tell

I can tell. JDA can tell. But unless you are already an AI-adept professional author who is actively utilizing the latest technologies, you are demonstrably unable to distinguish between AI-generated text and texts written by accomplished, bestselling writers:

Mark Lawrence is a very successful fantasy writer. His PRINCE OF THORNS has sold more than one million copies. He is one of the many professional authors who, while disdaining the use of textual AI, is concerned about its eventual impact on his profession. He recently conducted a very interesting experiment in which he and three other very well-established professional authors wrote short stories on the same subject, and ChatGPT 5 was prompted for four short stories on the same subject.

You can read all eight stories here and see for yourself if you can tell which stories are human-written and which are AI-generated. You don’t need to vote, and you’ll have to keep track of what you thought of each story yourself.

A statistically-significant number of 964 people, who, being fans of Lawrence are much more literate on average than the norm, read the stories and rated them. The results are intriguing and will probably surprise most people who don’t read here regularly. On average, the readers were able to correctly identify the provenance of 3 out of the 8 stories. Not only that, but the story they rated the highest, and 3 out of the 4 highest-rated stories, were all AI-generated.

Read the whole thing at AI Central. And the next time you see someone going on about “AI slop” or how AI just can’t produce the same emotions and feelings that humans can, you’ll know that they’re just posturing in obvious ignorance.

The ironic thing is that AI is actually going to improve the level of writing, because most books are very mediocre and AI is already better than that.

DISCUSS ON SG

Not Martin, Not Sanderson

I think we have to face it. I’m the best candidate to finish A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE:

Over the last year and a half the excuses for A Song of Ice And Fire being incomplete and George R.R. Martin’s inability to finish The Winds of Winter have become more than absurd. The author has gone from blaming toxic fandom, to talking about Trump and fascism in 2024, to a 2025 where he made it clear he’s definitely not even working on the project.

This year alone he’s started a bar in Santa Fe New Mexico and taken on a new project for an animated Hercules movie, leaving fans who started in A Game Of Thrones with the obvious fact that he’s not going to be finishing the series before he dies. In fact, he’s already given interviews stating he’s probably not going to finish it in his lifetime.

It’s become beyond a joke to fans at this juncture, as most people just want him to be honest about the situation, which for whatever reason, Martin refuses to do.

At Worldcon, one fan was bold enough to ask George R.R. Martin the question, one that now has been condemned as “rude” or “inappropriate” despite it being anything but in the context of a panel on the future of epic fantasy.

A bold female fan asked in a hostile room, “George, you’re not gonna be around for much longer. And this is a tough question. This is more directed at Brandon. I was wondering, like, how would you feel about someone else taking over and finishing the books?”

The crowd immediately starts booing as if the question didn’t make any sense, though it is a poignant one especially since Brandon Sanderson was brought in to take over A Wheel Of Time from Robert Jordan upon his passing.

Sanderson can be heard saying “not me,” during the uproar, confirming he wouldn’t be the one to do the job.

George R.R. Martin is so panicked about the question that he immediately gets up to leave the panel.

That’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. I’m one of the very few authors who has successfully written epic fantasy, as I’ll be finishing A GRAVE OF GODS in the next two years. ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT is one of the few that generally receives better reviews than A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and furthermore, they look pretty great in leather.

The only problem is that I am almost certainly the very last person on the planet whom George R.R. Martin would select to finish the series. Would I do it if I was asked? Certainly. I already have a pretty good idea how I would fix the structural problem that prevented Martin from finishing it and provide a much better end to the series than Martin and the HBO producers did.

But I have enough to do in making sure that I bring my own series to an end with a satisfying conclusion. Considering how few epic fantasy authors manage to do that, I think it’s a sufficiently difficult challenge that I need not lament the fact that Martin’s is unlikely to end well. Anyhow, my theory is that it’s actually been completed, but Martin prefers to have it published postmortem since he’s still feeling abused by the public reaction to the HBO series and he doesn’t want to risk going through all that again.

Speaking of books, I should mention that tomorrow is the last day to acquire the backer editions of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. I further note that later this week, we’ll announce the three Signed First Editions that will be produced in very limited runs and will be available for just one month starting later this week. The related and very good news is that we’ve worked out a deal with multiple parties to a) acquire the new machines and b) sell the old ones for the price we paid for them, so assuming that we sell a few of the special editions we’ll be announcing, everything should work out at least as well as we’d planned.

DISCUSS ON SG

Shots Fired! Shots Fired!

Much like the way the air grows still and the sky takes on a greenish tinge, one can almost feel the inevitable Facebook rant coming.

With Larry Correia announcing he would be launching a Kickstarter for his new Ark Press venture, a Baen Books insider reached out to Fandom Pulse to vent how similar the series seemed to their hit with him, Monster Hunter International. With Correia taking his own successful work and doing a spin on it for Ark Press, one has to wonder with AI writing becoming as good as it is, who can do MHI better: AI, or Larry Correia himself?

Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly good at writing with giant leaps up in the technological prowess over the last year, especially with the help of Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus 4.0 delivering prose levels many never thought possible.

Vox Day has been experimenting with AI to no small degree, making full albums out of music on Suno and testing the capabilities on short stories ranging from styles of Neil Gaiman, to John Scalzi, and even Larry Correia, pioneering the future in AI art.

Meanwhile, in traditional publishing, it appears as if Baen Books is in massive trouble as Correia sees the proverbial writing on the wall and has taken moves to diversify out of his long-time publisher and now announced he’s going to be kickstarting a series, American Paladin, that sounds very similar to Monster Hunter International, his long-time gun urban fantasy series that’s been a hit with Baen over the years.

Ark Press, his new publisher which is owned by mega-billionaire Peter Thiel, seemed to want an MHI-style story out of Correia to launch the press, and they’ve advertised its similarities as well.

Since Correia is taking his hit series and giving a new take on it, the question is, can AI build a better modern iteration of MHI than Larry Correia himself can given its new found prowess?

Vox Day has already been working on this with a serialized novel called Monster Control Inc. In this, he’s trained AI to write in Larry Correia’s style to provide a signature version that reads enough like Correia that if you didn’t know it was written by AI, you might think it’s Correia’s novels.

Just to be clear, Monster Control Incorporated utilizes a judicious blend of literary seasonings, one of which is Larry Correia’s. But because the objective was to utilize a Gamma protagonist, and since Larry is the most Delta author who ever wrote a Delta self-insert since Louis Lamour laid down his prolific pen, it was necessary to bring in other elements in order to capture that inimitable Gamma snark, passive-aggressiveness, and relentless obsession with unattainable women.

I also didn’t think that Larry’s signature gun porn was desirable in this case, although I certainly did utilize that in my non-AI Quantum Mortis novel, A Man Disrupted, and to such an extent that more than one review even asserted that I had outcorreia’d Correia himself, although I think that was not actually true and was merely an overenthusiastic response to my incorporation of orbital artillery into a police procedural.

It will be an interesting test, though. Can one of the leading critics of textual AI write a better pastiche of his own style than an AI can? Read Monster Control Incorporated and find out!

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Test of Three Tales

Just to give people here an idea of what sort of thing they’ll be able to find at AI CENTRAL, I posed three different AI text engines the same very specific challenge: a 2,500-word story in the style of a brilliant author. Bonus points if you can guess which author it was from this excerpt from one of the three entrants:

The Scarlet Visitor

The city of Paradyse rose from the sea like a dream of gold and shadow, its towers clawing at the sky, its streets winding in serpentine coils. Ships from distant lands brought spices, silks, and secrets to its harbors, but none so strange as the vessel that came on the eve of the Festival of Masks.

It was a ship without a name, its sails the color of dried blood, its hull black as a starless night. The dockmaster, a wizened man named Orlan, squinted at it through the salt-haze and crossed himself—though he could not say why. When the gangplank descended, only one figure emerged: a woman wrapped in a scarlet cloak, her face hidden behind a veil of silver lace.

She moved through the city like a whisper, her steps soundless, her presence drawing eyes yet leaving no impression. The people of Paradyse were accustomed to strangeness—this was a city where nobles wore living jewels that whispered secrets, where the dead sometimes walked the markets at dusk—but there was something about her that unsettled even the most jaded souls.

The woman took lodging at the Inn of the Twisted Serpent, a place frequented by those who did not wish to be found. The innkeeper, Madame Vex, was a creature of sharp angles and sharper wits, her fingers adorned with rings that could sting like scorpions. She offered the stranger a room without asking for coin, sensing that some debts were best left unspoken.

“How long will you stay in our fair city?” Madame Vex inquired, her voice like honeyed poison.

The woman lifted her veil just enough to sip her wine. Her lips were the same crimson as her cloak. “Until my business is concluded.”

“And what business is that?”

A smile, fleeting as a knife’s gleam. “The oldest kind.”

And there is a very clear and obvious winner, which may be of interest to some of the writers here. Visit AI CENTRAL to read all three entrants and see the verdict.

DISCUSS ON SG