Tag: writing

A Tale of Two Remembrances

Castalia House’s Morgan recalls his friendship with the late author, Howard Andrew Jones:

It was late 1997 or early 1998 that Howard Jones had contacted me. I was the Official Editor of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association at the time. Periodically someone would contact me on how to get their pastiche Conan novel sold or how to get on the syndicated Conan T. V. show which was showing at the time. I never saw that show.

I received an e-mail from Howard who introduced himself and told me that he wanted to be to Harold Lamb what Glenn Lord was to Robert E. Howard. Glenn Lord was the agent for the Robert E. Howard copyright holders for around 28 years. Those Zebra and Ace non-Conan Robert E. Howard paperback collections. Glenn Lord was the agent who made the deals. He was a breath of fresh air.

Thus began a decades long friendship with Howard. We discussed fantasy fiction and historical novels we liked. We discovered new authors through each other. He seemed to like Fritz Leiber more than Robert E. Howard when I first knew him. We both tracked down old obscure hardbacks of historical fiction from the pulps. I seemed to like Arthur D. Howden Smith more than he did. Despite that, he had a copy of the first Grey Maiden story by Smith and sent me a photocopy of it. He also lent me a bound set of pulp stories including Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s “He Rules Who Can,” Joseph Ivers Lawrence “Swords on the Northern Sea,” and a Sargasso Sea story by F. van Wyck Mason.

He got Harold Lamb’s fiction back into print with University of Nebraska’s Bison Books. Before this, there were two collections of Harold Lamb’s cossack stories from the 1960s. Bison Books produced eight large volumes of Harold Lamb’s fiction from both the pulp and slick magazines. Howard organized them in a logical manner. We had discussed at one time of co-editing a volume of sword & sorcery fiction covering the early and middle years as an introductory volume to new readers.

At the same time, he was the fiction editor for Black Gate magazine. He championed getting new sword & sorcery fiction published. Sword & sorcery had been banished by the big publishers (for probably ideological reasons) but Howard knew there was a desire for it.

John O’Neill of the late and much-lamented Black Gate magazine also paid tribute to his former editor:

Howard has been a huge part of my personal and professional life since 2002, when I opened a submission to Black Gate magazine and found a long, rambling, and extremely enthusiastic cover letter from him, expressing his delight at finding a quality magazine devoted to heroic fantasy. The letter ended with “I want in, bad,” and was attached to a terrific tale featuring two adventurers named Dabir and Asim.

We eventually published three Dabir and Asim tales in Black Gate, and within a few years Howard’s editorial contributions had become so essential to the magazine that we named him our first Managing Editor. He ran our non-fiction department, single-handedly recruiting and managing over a dozen contributors to fill some 80 pages every issue with thoughtful essays, book reviews, gaming coverage, and much more.

In November 2008 Howard told me he wanted to remake our website, and post new articles every single day, instead of a few times a month. I told him he was crazy. How in the world could we produce that much content, especially without a budget?

Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers, and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog. It was his vision, and he executed it magnificently, with a little help from Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight, Ryan Harvey, and others. Eight years later, the website won a World Fantasy Award — an honor that I still believe should have been presented to Howard.

Before long Howard’s own writing career had taken off with such magnitude that he had to step back from day-to-day duties at the magazine. Over the next fifteen years he released fifteen books, including three featuring Dabir and Asim, four novels in the Pathfinder universe, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy, three volumes in The Chronicles of Hanuvar, and the Harold Lamb collections Swords from the East and Swords from the West.

Howard was a wonderful writer. He believed in heroes, and that steadfast conviction informed all of his writing. But despite all his success Howard never lost touch with his other major talent — finding and nurturing new writers. Howard was an enormously gifted editor, and a tireless champion of underappreciated writers.

Many men have lived much longer, and left behind legacies that will not be remembered nearly as long, than Howard Andrew Jones.

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The Shadow Can Only Mock

It’s really fascinating to see how the manufactured “creative talents” who are inevitably mediocrities falsely proclaimed as geniuses, are prone to committing shameless and easily proven acts of plagiarism. Such as, just to give one example, the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Robert Zimmerman:

Beginning with his first album, which contained “House of the Risin’ Sun,” Dylan showed a penchant for lifting other performers’ work. At the time the album was recorded, fellow performer Dave Van Ronk was preparing his own version of the song. Dylan knew this; Van Ronk had even asked him not to record the song before he got his version out, but Dylan went ahead anyway, even using Van Ronk’s arrangement.

Charges of plagiarism only started gaining traction against Dylan around 2003. Around that time, with the Internet having made it easy to directly compare music from different sources, people started to notice how much of Dylan’s work sounded like other people’s stuff.

The melody from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for example, comes from a 19th-century spiritual called “No More Auction Block.” His 1962 song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” turned out to have been lifted wholesale from folk singer Len Chandler. Lyrics from the 2003 album Love and Theft were line-for-line copies from the autobiography of Japanese author Junichi Saga.

In 2006, he released Modern Times, which lifted passages from Classical poetry, 19th-century Confederate verse, and a blues song from 1940. Dylan won two Grammies for the album.

The plagiarism didn’t stop with the music. While much of what Dylan lifted from others without attribution was already in the public domain, and whatever wasn’t got reworked enough to count as Fair Use under copyright law, Dylan’s autobiography includes several passages lifted from novels and plays, and even from early-’60s issues of Time.

JRR Tolkien had these satanic frauds pegged from the start.

The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.

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“Considerable Disdain for Him”

I am, and have been for decades, a fan of Tanith Lee. I absolutely adore Tanith Lee. Her tales of Paradys and the Flat Earth are solidly entrenched in my top ten fantasy series, and while I wasn’t unaware that her work was a major stylistic influence on Neil Gaiman, due to what I observed to be his unoriginal mediocrity, I simply wasn’t well-read enough in Gaiman’s work to realize that Gaiman wasn’t just heavily influenced by Tanith Lee, he appears to have done little more than steal her characters and world-building without attribution in lieu of creating anything himself, as one fan of Lee’s noted:

Neil Gaiman’s THE SANDMAN is a great comic book series. Gaiman modeled his series on Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH. But you wouldn’t know this, because Gaiman has never given her any credit. Despite the fact that the main character — a byronic, pale, otherworldly, deity-like character — is the prince of night and dreams. Despite the fact that every time people see art depicting Tanith Lee’s main character Azhrarn, they think it’s Morpheus from the Sandman. (How bad is this? When people see depictions of her character, they say SHE must have ripped HIM off.)

Despite the fact that the dream lord’s younger sibling is Death.

Despite the fact that other members of his family include Delusion, Delirium…. They are not gods but beings older than gods, and when the gods die, Dream, Death, Delusion, and Delirium will remain. This family of immortal, eternal, unchanging beings, who each embody an eternal abstraction starting with the letter D.

Someone else on the internet, noticing the similarities, flipped open the third book in Tanith Lee’s series to a random page, and lo and behold, there’s a description of a character who was clearly the inspiration for Gaiman’s Mazikeen. The prose, the characters, the narrative strategies, the mythology, the story structure, all of it: Gaiman found it all in Tanith Lee‘s writing and never gave her any credit.

He became rich and famous profiting from her ideas. People effused over his amazing imagination, when the ideas they praised him for were actually created by Tanith Lee. And, while he was building his name and fame, she was struggling. In the 1990s, toward the end of her life, she complained in an interview that magazines weren’t buying her stories anymore.

A simple “If you like The Sandman, you should really read Tanith Lee’s books!” from Neil Gaiman would have meant so much to her career. To the livelihood of a struggling, less-privileged writer, whose amazing imagination Gaiman was actively ripping off. People praised The Sandman comics for their depiction of gay and trans identities. But in the original material, Tanith Lee was far more progressive about lgbtq+ identities, and that was twenty years earlier.

I first read Tanith Lee’s book NIGHT’S MASTER (the first in the FLAT EARTH series) in maybe 2005, about 10 years after first reading The Sandman. I looked to see if Gaiman had credited her for “his” ideas; as far as I could tell, he never had. And for the subsequent 19 years, whenever I see a new Neil Gaiman interview, the first thing I do is ctrl-F to search to see if he mentioned Tanith Lee. And he never has, that I’ve seen.

I have no difficulty believing the accusations against him.

Because I know — KNOW — that he has felt entitled to take what he wants from a woman, without her permission, and without any acknowledgement of her contributions.

And, finally: If you loved Neil Gaiman’s stories, if you are heartbroken to learn the storyteller you loved is apparently an abuser, here is my suggestion: track down Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH books. Her prose is more exquisite and imaginative, her ideas more original, her empathy real.

Not only that, but a personal acquaintance of Lee, Liz Williams, points out that Lee herself believed Gaiman plagiarised her work and had “considerable disdain for him.”

Tanith was my friend, as many writers in the UK will attest, especially on the south coast. I did know this, because she told me. We were at a convention – IIRC Orbital 8, in 2008 – at which both Neil and Tanith were guests. She told me that she was trying to avoid him because he’d plagiarised a large chunk of her work: not just a bit, but entire paragraphs. She didn’t say which book it was from. And she had considerable disdain for him.

A well-read reader on r/neilgaimanuncovered confirmed the charge.

He basically stole Sandman from Tanith Lee’s “Tales of the Flat Earth“ and his “Snow, Glass, Apples” from her “Red as Blood” with zero credit whatsoever, never even a recommendation that others read her work (a major sign of insecurity and guilt, right there). He also stole Coraline from Clive Barker’s ”The Thief of Always.” He’s a fraud as well as a monster.

I never read Snow, Glass Apples but I do recall thinking its description sounded an awful lot like Red as Blood. All of his revised fairy tale stories struck me as very similar to Lee’s White as Snow, but again, I never bothered reading any of Gaiman’s short stories until very recently. And since I’ve never read Coraline or anything by Clive Barker, I wasn’t aware of the relationship between those two works either.

But it is very satisfying to see the literary world finally coming out and telling the public the obvious truth about Neil Gaiman’s mediocrity and total lack of creativity. He’s never been a great writer, he’s never been a great storyteller, he is instead, as Terry Pratchett suggested, “an incredible actor” playing the role of a great storyteller. In my opinion, these charges of stealing without attribution and plagiarism tend to further support my hypothesis that “Neil Gaiman, Bestselling Author” was a literary fraud manufactured by the much the same people who made L. Ron Hubbard a bestselling author.

The conclusion appears to be as apt as it is succinct. “He’s a fraud as well as a monster.”

So finally, we have the answer that we’ve suspected for months. Robert Rankin indicates that Terry Pratchett had more than an inkling that his Good Omens co-writer and supposed good friend was not “a very nice, approachable guy” but an actor hiding his true self.

“Terry told me he wished he’d never worked with him, but I never found out why.”

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The Only Skull

As you may or may not be aware, George Gordon Byron is one of my favorite poets. And his “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull” is my favorite poem that wasn’t written by a particular friend of mine, Dante, or A.A. Milne. And while it’s not well known, but I am actually a published poet, as I wrote a poem that was published in Bucknell University’s poetry journal when I was studying there.

Of course, as always seems to be the case, the combination of my talents with my iconoclasm not only caused the poem to be accepted for publication, but also caused half the staff to quit in protest after it was published. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

In any event, I put the Byronic poem to restrained nu-metal, took the liberty of changing the two instances of “quaff” to drank/drink since it just didn’t work, put together a chorus that fit the context, used the final verse as a pseudo-chorus, and threw on a lyrical outro. The poem is well worth reading, and if you want to hear the musical version, you can hear The Only Skull on UATV. When I put the album out in the spring, this will definitely be on it.

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I drank like thee;
I died, let earth my bones resign:
Fill up thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm’s slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods than reptile’s food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shown,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not—since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Now rhyme and revel,
Rhyme and revel,
Why—not rhyme and revel?
Rhyme and revel with the dead!

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The Self-Destruction of Brandon Sanderson

Fandom Pulse has chronicled Brandon Sanderson’s descent into ticket-taking and social justice convergence, but Sanderson has been creating some additional problems for his fiction writing as well, technical problems that no one but a better epic fantasy author is likely to notice.

Re: Brandon needs to be edited more. I assure you, I’m edited more now than I ever have been–so I don’t believe editing isn’t the issue some people are having. Tress and Sunlit, for example, were written not long ago, and are both quite tight as a narrative. Both were edited less than Stormlight 5. Writing speed isn’t the problem either, as the fastest I’ve ever been required to write was during the Gathering Storm / Way of Kings era, and those are books that are generally (by comparison) not talked about the same way as (say) Rhythm of War.

The issue is story scope expansion–Stormlight in particular has a LOT going on. I can see some people wishing for the tighter narratives of the first two books, but there are things I can do with this kind of story I couldn’t do with those. I like a variety, and this IS the story I want to tell here, despite being capable of doing it other ways. Every scene was one I wanted in the book, and sometimes I like to do different things, for different readers. I got the same complaints about the way I did the Bridge Four individual viewpoints in Oathbringer, for example. There were lots of suggestions I cut them during editorial and early reads, and I refused not because there is no validity to these ideas, but because this was the story I legitimately wanted to tell.

This is more than a little ironic, given the way in which Sanderson was brought in to fix a similar problem that the late Robert Jordan had created for himself, and especially in light of how George R. R. Martin has apparently facing the end of his literary career without finishing A Song of Ice and Fire for the very same self-indulgent reason that Sanderson gives for the way in which his readers have perceived a decline in the quality of his books.

The reason that Sanderson gives, story scope expansion, is correct, but it is too general for the average reader or writer to understand the true root of the problem. Now, this is just a surmise, because I have only read two Sanderson novels and part of another, and I regard him as the epitome of boring mediocrity when it comes to epic fantasy. I’d rather read The Sword of Shannara, the most incoherent of Erikson’s Malazan books, or anything by Joel Abercrombie than another chapter of Sanderson’s tedious meandering.

But if any Sanderson fans here would like to check, I am confident that if you count up the number of perspective characters he’s utilizing, you will find that they are increasing from book to book. Just as George Martin did before him, Sanderson has been expanding the scope of the story by introducing new perspective characters and promoting minor characters to perspective characters, and that means he has been getting distracted by tangents taking his focus away from the larger story. By doing so, he is running a very serious risk of not only rendering his story incoherent and unreadable, but impossible to finish in a manner that will be reasonably satisfying to the reader. If anyone would care to count up the number of perspective characters in each book and report them to me via email or on SG, I will update the post with the perspective character count by book. That should tell us how grave the problem is.

UPDATE: It will probably surprise no one here to learn that the diagnosis was correct. An SG reader provided a perspective character count for the Stormlight Archives, in which he bundled a few small group perspectives that appear in the last three books into one for the purposes of comparison. Anyhow, Sanderson has clearly committed the same technical blunder that Martin did in expanding the scope of his story.

  • SA1: 6
  • SA2: 6
  • SA3: 14
  • SA4: 14
  • SA5: 23

This is the sort of thing of which the average novelist or editor isn’t aware, because writing an epic, be it fantasy or science fiction, is a very, very different thing than writing a novel. An epic bears about the same relationship to a novel that a novel does to a short story or a novelette. Indeed, each chapter of A Throne of Bones and A Sea of Skulls, essentially functions as a novelette and many of them could be reasonably published as stand-alones without the average reader noticing it was part of a larger work.

I described the way in which story scope expansion creates the technical problem faced by Martin in a post last year.

Consider the POV breakdown of A Game of Thrones, the first book of ASOIAF. Eight perspective characters, with Ned accounting for 15 chapters and 18.3 percent of the focus. Only Ned was eliminated by the end of the book, so Martin entered the second book of the series with a very manageable seven characters. He adds three characters to reach 10, then two more in the third for 12, however, he only continues the stories of three of those 12 characters as he introduces 10 more in the fourth book. By the end of A Dance with Dragons, Martin had divided up his increasingly out-of-control story amidst 18 perspective characters and entered The Winds of Winter with up to 30(!) potential perspective characters whose stories require at least some degree of resolution!

Dividing 300k words among thirty characters means devoting the equivalent of one novelette to each character’s perspective, while somehow trying to tie them all together in a coherent manner. While it’s theoretically possible, I’ve never seen anyone accomplish anything even close to that degree of literary difficulty. Some readers might find it interesting to know that in addition to predicting Martin’s inability to finish his series, last year I also pointed out that Brandon Sanderson would not be able to fix the technical problem with ASOIAF and bring it to a proper conclusion.

Given that Sanderson has blundered into the same problem that did in Martin’s series, it appears that my observation was correct. And it also tends to confirm my opinion that despite his massive sales success, Sanderson is not in my league as an author of epic fantasy; that may well sound arrogant, but it’s not as if the sample size of works that, while unfinished, exceed the length of The Lord of the Rings, are insufficient for a determinative comparison.

As any look at the forgotten bestsellers of 100 years ago will tell you, the best books are the ones that survive to be read by future generations, not those that sell best in their own day. And as Deng Xiaoping once said of the French Revolution, it’s just too soon for us to tell.

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Always Mid, Now Gay

It turns out Brandon Sanderson wasn’t merely mediocre, it appears he has been a ticket-taker all along:

Brandon Sanderson was what many considered to be the last, best hope for the epic fantasy genre after his Mistborn series and finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time, but in recent years, the Tor Books author has gone woke, and fans say the current The Stormlight Archive novel, Wind and Truth has gone too far.

Many fans complained about a main plotline of a gay romance between two men, promoted in the book as if it is a positive lifestyle instead of the sexual sin that it is. Moreover, it’s noted the scenes are forced and out of place in a medieval fantasy setting where it feels ham-fisted and modern.

Wind and Truth comes after a blog post updating his stance on LGBTQ as Sanderson has gone from a devout Mormon who refused to include such evils in his books, to putting them as background characters in Stormlight Archives to acknowledge they exist, to actively promoting the sinful lifestyles.

Sanderson posted, saying, “My current stance is one of unequivocable support for LGBTQ+ rights. I support gay marriage. I support trans rights, the rights of non-binary people, and I support the rights of trans people to affirm their own identity with love and support. I support anti-discrimination legislation, and have voted consistently along these lines for the last fifteen years. I am marking the posting of this FAQ item, at the encouragement of several of my LGBTQ+ fans, with a sizable donation to the Utah Pride Center and another to The OUT Foundation.”

He continued saying this new stance would influence his books like The Stormlight Archives, saying, “I put LGBTQ+ people into my books, and will continue to do so. Not because I want to fulfill a quota, but because I genuinely believe that it is right for the characters–and is a good and important thing for me to be doing.”

At this point, I suspect it should be abundantly clear who the only modern heir to Tolkien in the epic fantasy genre could possibly be. Especially for any reader who honestly compares Arts of Dark and Light to Mistborn or The Stormlight Archives. It’s very, very unlikely that this will be recognized at any point in the next 30 or so years for obvious reasons, but that’s absolutely fine.

Once it goes into the public domain, it will rapidly surpass all of its copyright-protected inferiors.

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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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