Tagfiction
What’s Happening to Literature?
Why aren't students reading anything anymore?
Sam Altman Was on My Favorite Writing Podcast. His View on Storytelling Surprised Me.
When we read, we want to hear from a human about what it means to be human.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has garnered a fair share of criticism from the writing crowd for creating ChatGPT, a tool that on the surface seems to banish the need for human writers at all. However, Altman recently appeared on David Perell’s prominent writing podcast “How I Write” to talk about his own writing process, AI, and what he uses ChatGPT for. Altman and Perell talk about the importance of language for human communication, with Altman noting how he can’t imagine human life without language. AI, Altman says, is supposed to make language and the writing process “better.” In his view, that’s what computers have also sought to do: Create opportunities for humans to expand and deepen their capacities. But Read More ›
The Return of the Rings
Time to revisit Middle-earthAugust has been a big month for Tolkien fans. Season 2 of Amazon’s The Rings of Power is slated to premiere on Thursday, August 29th, two years after the first season (with its billion-dollar budget) dropped and garnered mixed reviews. You can read my own two cents on The Rings of Power here and here. The question a lots of Tolkien fans are probably asking now is whether the show can recover from a slow start, some poor character development and cliche dialogue, and some basic plot issues that made many of us wish more time was invested on the story than the stratospheric budget. We’ll see. Here’s the trailer for Season 2: The Rings of Power isn’t the only Read More ›
Spaceman Review, Part 3
Sometimes you have to leave what you love to go on a missionLast time, we talked about Jakub’s new buddy, a giant spider that may or may not be real. This potential hallucination wants to help the astronaut with his loneliness because his wife, Lenka, has left him. The trouble is that the spider’s idea of helping poor Jakub is forcing him to remember his past. The writer wanted to give Jakub a redemption arch using these flashbacks; however, the astronaut’s memories were shown in a disjointed order, confusing the story and making Lenka look very bad, which made her and Jakub’s relationship difficult to root for. The chaotic flashbacks, mixed with a variety of plot holes, made for a very irritating story. One of the most glaring plot holes arises when Read More ›
Green Goblin, the Hasty Transhumanist
A classic Marvel villain presents a picture of hurried science gone wrong“The product is certified ready for human testing.” I’m not quoting Elon Musk in relation to Neuralink. That’s the line from the fictional Norman Osborn in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man movie, starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and the green maniac himself, Willem Dafoe. I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, so maybe it’s due to the weird fact that twenty-plus years after this film hit the scene, we now live in a world where big science organizations like Osborn’s Oscorp seem to be dealing with similar conflicts that ultimately produced the iconic Green Goblin. Not that Elon Musk or Sam Altman are going to start flying around on saucers and terrorize New York City. But they are eager to rush Read More ›
David Foster Wallace: If Screens Are Your Main Media Diet, You’re Going to Die
The novelist warned about the pitfalls of the online life“If we ate like this all the time, what would be wrong with that?” So asks David Foster Wallace, compellingly played by Jason Segel, in the 2015 film The End of the Tour. Wallace is in the car with a Rolling Stone reporter, David Lipsky, cramming down sweets from a gas station when he says that. After Lipsky quips back about obesity, Wallace says, “It has none of the substance of real food, but it’s real pleasurable.” The End of the Tour is set in 1996 shortly after Wallace’s gargantuan novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene and impressed the nation with its length, wit, tragedy, and insight. A massive book about loneliness, Infinite Jest takes place in a semi-futuristic Read More ›
A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Canticle of Speculative Warning
A 1959 novel's speculation of nuclear fallout is yet a story of hope.This past year seems to have been the year of the atomic bomb, at least in what I’ve read and watched. I started 2023 by reading The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, a pair of novels that consistently alludes to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer arrived a few months later in July, sobering audiences worldwide and reinvigorating public interest in the godlike power these brilliant scientists had unleashed on the world. Most recently, I read the 1959 dystopian novel by Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a speculative tale about nuclear holocaust and the perennial human tendency for self-destruction. What a cheery year it’s been! Maybe I’ll switch things up and read Anne of Green Read More ›
Alien 3 Review, Part 4
Ripley's curtain callIn the third article, Ripley woke up in an all-male prison after surviving a shuttle crash. A parasitic alien tagged along and implanted an embryo in an inmate’s dog. The embryo breaks out of the animal and begins killing people until everyone figures out what’s going on, then they hatched one of the dumbest plans I’ve ever seen in cinema. After that, Ripley begins feeling sick. She goes to her still fully intact cryobed and scans herself. She finds that the parasitic alien has also planted an embryo inside her. The fact that Ripley had an embryo in her the entire time is ridiculous for a number of reasons. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, her cryobed wasn’t broken, so Read More ›
Reading in the Digital Age
Writer Joseph Epstein argues compellingly on behalf of the novel.
Why You Should Read More Fiction
The mental benefits for reading good stories are many.When looking for “solutions” to today’s mental health crisis in the United States, particularly among the millions of men who are checking out of society, reading fiction may not immediately come to mind. However, a new article from Psychology Today argues that reading fiction is “essential” for today’s men. The author of the article, psychologist Jett Stone, focuses on men in part because today’s literary market is largely geared towards women, and fiction and femininity are often closely associated. Nonetheless, he believes that reading fiction can benefit both women and men. He writes, Recent research indicates that reading fiction fosters critical thinking by presenting ideas subtly and in more roundabout ways than nonfiction. One study of adolescents found that frequent fiction readers possessed more Read More ›
Literature and Personal Consciousness: Why AI Can’t Speak to You
AI can never intend meaning like a human author can
Cormac McCarthy’s Love for Science and Mathematics
His interest in science and mathematics were not extraneous hobbies but performed a strong role in the fiction he wroteThe late novelist Cormac McCarthy passed away on June 13th in Santa Fe, leaving a legacy of fictional works grappling with fate, masculine alienation, and the possibility of a transcendent reality. McCarthy’s two last books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which are intended to be read together, are about a brother and sister who are both brilliant mathematicians, and whose father helped craft the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project. McCarthy’s work is haunted both by a bleak fatalism and glimpses of an enduring reality beyond the merely physical. His interest in science and mathematics were not extraneous hobbies; they performed a strong role in the fiction he wrote. Nick Romeo writes at Scientific American, Science is also a source Read More ›
Is Mathematics an Illusion? Lawrence Krauss and Cormac McCarthy Discuss
McCarthy asked, "Would mathematics be here if we weren't?"In December, physicist and author Lawrence Krauss interviewed the late American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died on June 13th at the age of 89 in Santa Fe, N.M. McCarthy is famous for his remarkable fictional works like The Road and Blood Meridian, but he was also deeply fascinated with mathematics and science. Apparently, he enjoyed reading science more than he did fiction! He moved to Santa Fe from El Paso to be closer to the Santa Fe Institute, a science think tank where McCarthy would spend time speaking with various physicists, scientists, and mathematicians. His latest two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, are about a brother and sister who are both brilliant mathematicians. Towards the beginning of the interview, Read More ›
Novelist Haruki Murakami: Writing Involves Trust
Writing powerful literature is a human endeavor written for a human audienceI just finished a book by the renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami called Novelist as a Vocation. Murakami is the author of 1Q84, Norwegian Wood, and Kafka on the Shore, among many others. As a young novelist myself, I wanted to learn a professional’s thoughts on the trade and also get a sense of his philosophy of writing, which in the age of AI, feels increasingly valuable. Most of the book was composed during or before 2015 but was just published last year, and is basically a compendium of essays on the novel-writing process, how Murakami got started, and the broader literary landscape. Connecting With Readers Murakami’s thoughts on his readership and audience particularly stood out to me. He confesses Read More ›
Escape from Spiderhead and the Question of Love
Is love more than a chemical reaction and are humans more than machines made of meat?Brave New World, a speculative work by British writer Aldous Huxley, explores a society where people are conditioned via drugs and genetic engineering to live stable, highly pleasurable, but totally meaningless lives. One pop of a pill, and negative feelings like sadness, anger, or envy vanish. In the brave new world, “everyone belongs to everyone else,” and pleasure supplants purpose. A Story for Our Age That book was written in 1932. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and another fictional work, albeit shorter, goes arguably even deeper than Huxley’s magnum opus. The short story Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders is about a group of inmates being tested by mood-altering drugs in a facility nicknamed “Spiderhead” for its nebulous layout. Read More ›
Wesley J. Smith on Why You Should Read Dean Koontz
The bestselling novelist's work is both entertaining and profoundly insightful into our cultural momentWesley J. Smith, Chair of Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, wrote an article praising the prolific literature of his friend Dean Koontz, whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Smith finds Koontz both a unique writer and a remarkable person with a powerful story of redemption. Born in poverty in Pennsylvania under the hand of an abusive father, Koontz persevered and pursued novel writing with the help of his wife’s encouragement. The rest is history. Through daily discipline, keen research, and profound imagination, Koontz has written dozens of bestsellers. First and foremost, his books entertain and delight. In addition, however, they deliver their fair share of social commentary and critique. Much of his work explores the Read More ›
Klara and the Sun: A Review
The sci-fi bestseller asks us: can machines become humans?Klara and the Sun is novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, a dystopian story told through the lens of an “artificial friend” (AF) named Klara. Ishiguro is known for his provocative speculative fiction, including the novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. Klara and the Sun similarly alludes to a dark, post-industrial, futuristic world, but it is told through the innocent lens of an artificial mind, highlighting the vestiges of human behavior and brokenness in ways that perhaps an “ordinary” narrator might not be able to manage. The novel starts out with Klara on display in a store waiting to be purchased. Eventually, she’s chosen by a girl named Josie and her mother, and thus begins her Read More ›
Separating Fact from Fiction?
This sci-fi journal is being flooded with A.I. generated submissionsThe major science fiction/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld recently announced that it will be closing submissions for the foreseeable future. Why? A.I. generated stories. The magazine has long been the recipient of open submissions and is interested in publishing new voices, but because of an influx of poor A.I. written works, is now overwhelmed. Editor Neil Clarke wrote on Twitter, “Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.” Clarke said the closure wouldn’t be definite, but also noted with some severity that this will be an ongoing problem and that there’s no evident solution in sight at the moment. He continued in the Twitter thread: We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors Read More ›
Huxley’s Brave New World and the Hard Work of Sadness
A society centered on pleasure has no place for mourning, and so has no room for loveNinety years ago, Aldous Huxley published his prophetic and incisive Brave New World (1932), a dystopian novel that imagines a society of people intoxicated and controlled, not by state power, but by pleasure. Whereas George Orwell predicted an inevitable totalitarian world government in his novel 1984 (penned in 1949), Huxley proposed that human beings wouldn’t need to be coerced into submission but could be coaxed by the allure of pain-erasing drugs. Both nightmarish visions of the future have already somewhat played out today in American society. The government set up the Disinformation Governance Board in April of 2022, which sounds eerily like the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s 1984. (The board has since disbanded.) Tech companies can track us more Read More ›