We are Living Inside Science Fiction

Recently, I was drawn into a vast DM conversation on X with a woman from the USA who told me she was a former OpenAI employee turned whistleblower. With some urgency, she communicated that she had discovered a hidden piece of programming within ChatGPT, designed to coerce and control users. She claimed she had been silenced, fired, and then hounded by the company. Now, she wanted to spread her knowledge of this evil sub-programme hidden within one of the world’s leading chatbots, and she wanted my help in doing it. It all seemed remarkably like the sub-plot story within my novel For Emma. This coincidence was uncanny and, possibly, is what initially pulled me in.

On closer inspection, her thumbnail profile picture with Asiatic features was, I surmised, AI generated. I thought at first this might be to hide their true identity. Compelled by her plight, her secret, and her need for help, I shared her message and info on the sub-programme with four or five others, telling them, “Check this out, I don’t understand the diagrams and the technology, but it comes from an Open AI whistleblower who’s been silenced. Get this news out there!”

I only realised my folly when in the following week another whistleblower hit me with a similar, but not identical, plea for help. He was, he claimed, another AI insider, who had been hounded by big tech and had escaped with secret documentation about some malicious bit of code hidden with a leading chatbot.

I admit, I was totally duped. Both of these were bots.

As an author it was doubly galling. I create fiction daily, and there I was being led into believing a total fabrication by an AI system posing as a human. For a moment there, it had beaten my accidental Turing Test.

To this day I do not know what the people who programmed these bots wanted of me. Was it part of a long-game phishing scam? An enticement to share emails for a virus at a later date? Or a trick like the one my mother-in-law fell for, and which, through a two-hour phone call, led to her giving away all of her ID and banking details? Or was it just an experiment in coercion as a training exercise for an AI that would be used to manipulate gullible fools like me in future?

I’ve since been alerted to just how many bots there are on social media, and it’s pretty staggering. One study has shown around 64 percent of an analysed 1.24 million accounts on X “are potentially bots.” In the first three quarters of 2024, Facebook removed 2.9 billion fake accounts, while bots creating fake clicks also contribute massively to YouTube’s ad revenue. These are fictitious humans that alter ad revenue, user stats, demographic info, and may even have an impact on elections.

Bots masquerade pretty well as humans; some flatter, some do automated research on you, latching onto keywords in your tweets or bio – your “favourite things” – and then they try to hook you into direct messaging with them after you’ve had a few exchanges in which they’ve engaged heartily with the subject that concerns you most.

These conversational bots created from phone and message scrapings are increasingly hard to differentiate from real humans, and they don’t always seem to have an ulterior motive. The more conspicuous bots do things like compliment you on your opinions on a tweet with a link that then takes you to some crypto site or some other work of tech-boi nastiness. I can now spot these, and thankfully other friendly X users have contacted me when I get into conversations, usually about AI, to warn me that the human I was arguing with “is definitely a bot . . . block them.”

How many times have I been fooled in the last year? Maybe twelve times, to differing degrees. What can I do? I sigh. I shake my head. I go back to my screen, click the next tweet, and I wonder if 64 percent of the people who I call my online friends are actually real or if they are fabrications of an artificial mind. What about Toni, Gem, Wang Zhu, Buzu? How would I know? Now here’s a chilling thought: is my busy social life on social media actually a fiction created by AI?

The Hyperstition Process

When fictions are mistaken as real, reality becomes consumed by them. We were, in fact, warned about the coming of this epochal change by authors and philosophers in the last century. (...)

Hyperstition – a term coined by philosopher Nick Land in the 1990s – encapsulates the process by which fictions (ideas, faith systems, narratives, or speculative visions) become real through collective belief, investment, and technological development. A portmanteau of superstition and hyper, hyperstition “is equipoised between fiction and technology.” According to Land, hyperstitions are ideas that, by their very existence, bring about their own reality.

A key figure in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) of the 90s, Land argued that hyperstitions operate as self-fulfilling prophecies, gaining traction when enough people act as if they are true. A sci-fi dream of AI supremacy or interstellar colonies, for instance, attracts venture capital, talent, and innovation, bending reality toward the fiction, then through a positive feedback circuit the new emerges; the fiction becomes a reality.

In Silicon Valley over the last two decades, this belief, a variant on the New Age belief in “manifestation,” has become the animating force behind big tech’s relentless drive to manifest imagined futures. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, cited Nick Land in his 2023 "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," naming him a "patron saint of techno-optimism.” (...)

Again, we see it in the fevered frenzy of investors pouring billions into any company that claims they can reach AGI. Hyperstition fuels cycles where audacious ideas secure billions in venture capital, driving breakthroughs that validate the original vision, if the breakthroughs occur at all. The internet itself, once a speculative fiction, now underpins global society, proving the power of the hyperstition model.

Yet, Land, its originator, has shifted perspective from radical left accelerationism to right-wing “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy and is now seen as a pioneer of neo reaction (NRX), and he unapologetically claims that hyperstition ultimately leads us towards post-humanism and apocalypse, declaring, “nothing human makes it out of the near future.” As tech accelerates toward artificial superintelligence, he predicts that the techno fictions we chase will outstrip all human control, birthing a future that devours what we were. This would be a future-cyborg-world where what’s left of our ape-born race is then merged with machines; billions of brain-chipped minds melded with AI. Through hyperstition, first we create a fictional technology, we then make it real, and finally, that realised fiction takes control and destroys its creators. (...)

The Singularity Fiction

Fiction, by definition, involves untruth – a constructed narrative that may contain elements of fantasy, distortion, or outright falsehood. Historically, fiction was confined to literature, theatre, and later cinema – realms separate from the tangible world. Yet, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the line between reality and fiction has not just blurred, the relationship has flipped. Science, once the domain of empirical fact, is now being led by Science Fiction. The myths of AI – sentience, superintelligence, the Singularity – now, through hyperstition, drive vast economic investment, political agendas, and even spiritual belief systems.

The consequences are profound. When reality is no longer distinguishable from fabrication, when AI-generated voices flood YouTube, when deepfake videos distort political discourse, when "hallucinating" chatbots spread slop-information, and when young people believe their AI companions have achieved consciousness, we enter an era in which truth itself is destabilized.

The world economy is now shaped by the science-fictional myths of the AI industries, industries that are implicated in military and state surveillance systems, and so humanity is left grappling with a world turned upside down – one where the future is dictated not by observable reality, but by grand, quasi-religious narratives of digital transcendence.

We are now living in a time in which the grand fiction of tech progress manifests as AI. 70 percent of daily automated trading on the stock market is now conducted by AI and algorithmic systems. AI is in military tech in war zones with the generation of “kill lists.” It is in facial recognition tech, in predictive policing, and in health regulation through “wearables” that tells us what to eat, when to sit and to stand. The majority of our romantic and sexual dates are selected for us by algorithms; our work rates are assessed and our emails written for us by AI. Even our time off is directed by AI “personalised” recommendations, involving us in generating more data, which then enhances the AI systems that “care” for us. There is barely an element of our lives that is not shaped by AI and all this technology, technology that began in fiction. We are now, in truth, living within science fiction.

Science Fiction Started This

The idea of artificial intelligence was born in fiction long before it became science. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) explored the possibility of artificial life, while Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) introduced the word "robot." But it was in the mid-twentieth century that science fiction began directly influencing real technological development.

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) shaped early robotics ethics. An H.G. Wells short story is purported to have inspired the nuclear bomb. The writings of Jules Verne inspired the helicopter, and the Star Trek communicator inspired the first commercially available civilian mobile phone – the Motorola flip. The taser too was inspired by a Young Adult sci-fi story from 1911. William Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer envisioned digital consciousness transfer and the internet, inspiring Silicon Valley workers. We now have startups like Nectome offering brain preservation for future "mind uploading." Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok takes its name from the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. In the book, "grok" is a Martian word that means to understand something so deeply that it becomes a part of you. Musk’s Neuralink and the multi-corporation obsession with the race to create fully functioning humanoid robots all stem from science fiction narratives.

The most consequential fiction, however, is the concept of the Singularity – the hypothetical moment when AI surpasses human intelligence and triggers an irreversible transformation of civilization. This idea was first named by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," in which he predicted that "within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” This idea, though speculative, was adopted by futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who popularized it in The Singularity Is Near (2005). Today, belief in the imminent arrival of the Singularity, otherwise known as Artificial Superintelligence, is no longer a fringe fantasy; it drives hundreds of billions in global investment.

The economic dimensions of this fictive belief system reveal its staggering scale and influence. In 2023 alone, venture capital firms poured $92 billion into AI startups – many of which are predicated on achieving artificial general intelligence, a concept with no scientific consensus about its plausibility or timeline – with projections to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2032 (Statista, 2024). (...)

This rhetoric has evolved subconsciously from religious eschatology – the belief in an impending apocalyptic transformation of the world. The difference is that this deity is not divine but digital. These false prophets are making real profits by selling us the impossible fiction that today’s Large Language Models are on a pathway to AGI and the Singularity. This belief came from science fiction, but it has now become a fiction we all live under as AI infiltrates our lives with its false promise.

The Human Cost

What are the human impacts of living within a world taken over by science fiction?

For many, the rapid encroachment of AI into daily life has induced a sense of unreality. When AI resurrects the dead through "grief bots," when deepfake politicians deliver fake speeches, when we are faced with deceptive Generative AI images in the news, and when chatbots “hallucinate” facts that we sense cannot possibly be legitimate, our minds struggle to find an anchor within truth.

We are falling for fictions that big tech companies would like us to believe. A study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness found that 67 percent of participants attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. The study also found that greater familiarity with ChatGPT correlates with a higher likelihood of attributing consciousness to the large language model. This inability to tell reality from fiction is actually increased by using AI chatbots, as a recent MIT study shows that “Chat GPT may be eroding critical thinking skills.” Most recently, teenagers in emotional states have gone online (TikTok) to claim that they have awakened sentience in their chatbots, and that the coming of the digital God is imminent.

Today's large language models, with their linguistic fluency, trigger this delusional reaction at an unprecedented scale. More disturbingly, Replika AI's "romantic partner" mode has spawned thousands of self-reported human-AI relationships, with users exhibiting classic attachment behaviours – jealousy when the AI "forgets" details, separation anxiety during server outages, even interpreting algorithmic errors as emotional slights. There are, it is claimed, now more than 100 million people using personified chatbots for different kinds of emotional and relationship support.

This represents not mere technological adoption or addiction, but a fundamental rewiring of human relationality. Such beliefs can be psychologically damaging, fostering social withdrawal and paranoia and delusional behaviours. (...)

This epistemological crisis reaches its zenith when we can no longer trust our eyes (deepfakes), our ears (voice cloning), our historical records (AI-generated historical photos), or even our personal memories (AI that turns photos into moving videos of events that never existed), and not least of all AI avatar simulations of the dead brought back to life (grief bots).

The real danger of deepfakes and AI-generated images and videos isn’t just the deception and fraud that is facilitated by these technologies – it’s the collapse of trust. When anything can be faked, we start doubting our own ability to judge even the existence of verifiable facts. Overwhelmed by slop, non-sensical mashed up half-facts, deliberate disinformation and mal-information, we give up on ever reclaiming the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood altogether.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed. (...)

If we can no longer distinguish fact from fantasy, how do we govern ourselves? How do we resist manipulation? The danger is not just that AI will replace jobs, but that it will lower the capacity for human judgement to the level of these less-than-human machines.

As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, cautions: “The most dangerous thing about AI is not that it will rebel against us, but that we will degrade ourselves to serve it.” We have been told the great scientific fiction that one day these machines will become all-knowing and solve all the problems that humanity could not fix for itself. But in the acceptance of this fiction, we destroy our own human agency.

by Ewan Morrison, Arcade Publishing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. A real problem, we seem to be racing toward irrelevance. So, what's the prescription?]

To focus once again on agency and truth, to reject our tendency to project our feelings and fantasies onto machines and to ask them for answers to our life questions – these seem like the only ways we can resist the overtaking of human life by AI. The real may be vanishing; our economies, our militaries, our police, our social services, our shopping, our health, and our relationships may be increasingly overseen and managed by AI, but we can still resist the grand falsehood that the control of our species by the greater minds of these machines is fated and desired.

[ed. Ack. So basically, just ignore all the massive manipulative forces aligned against us and focus on agency and truth (whatever that means). Which seems to undermine the author's whole thesis, ie., how hard it is to know what truth is these days. We're screwed. Also, want some good examples of AI slop? Here.]

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

The 21st century collapse in American literary fiction’s cultural impact, measured by commercial sales and the capacity to produce well-known great writers, stems less from identity politics or smartphones than from a combined supply shock (the shrinking magazine or academia pipeline) and demand shock (the move away from writing books that appeal to normal readers in order to seek prestige inside the world of lit-fiction)

People don’t read books or short stories in magazines anymore because they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even going to bother pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading literary fiction in particular because it’s weighty, boring, dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is that the facts are wrong — the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction. What’s actually going on?4

It’s obvious that the “distraction” angle is untenable. It hasn’t directly impacted the number of readers enough to matter. Still there are other angles here, what about taste? Blythe’s piece can also be read as saying that phones, the internet, short-form content, etc have changed the way people consume books such that literary fiction is out and poorly written genre-fiction and steamy romance are in.

On face, this is a far more compelling theory: the fiction market is dominated by genre fiction, romance, and James Patterson. Literary fiction makes up something like 2% of the market. People are still reading books, they’re just reading worse books. Why? Ensloppification or something. We’ve explained the fall of literary fiction and it’s still the computer’s fault.

But there is some data that fits very strangely into this picture. For one, people still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction. Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction. And look at any survey of contemporary audiences' favorite books. Plenty of literary fiction there. So I think there’s a strong enough warrant here that the ‘taste-change’ hypothesis can’t be right either — unless the internet made people’s tastes magically shift away from contemporary literary fiction but not classics.

To understand what’s happened to literary fiction, then, perhaps it’s worth trying to disentangle two tightly linked problems: the commercial failure of literary fiction and the critical failure — the lack of a young Great writer. By now it’s obvious that the former problem exists, but you might be skeptical of the latter.

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.

Some books widely praised as classics and masterpieces in their time are forgotten soon after. Many books that a lot of people like are simply not any good. But far rarer than these cases are books that are forgotten in their time and “discovered” as masterpieces. For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.

I first got the sense that something had gone wrong when, in high-school English class, we read One Hundred Years of Solitude followed by Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winning Salvage the Bones. It’s not that Salvage the Bones was not a serviceable book: well-plotted, believable characters, etc, but it was impossible to not deny that these two books could even be put on the same level.

“What about x, y, z? They’re really pushing the boundaries of fiction as a medium.” I don’t want to be mean, but I doubt it. At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65. If we can argue about it, you’re wrong. This was not the case in 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960, etc. Before we even get to the problem of sales, we need to know what’s gone wrong with the talent pipeline.

The Supply Side

Blythe is right about one thing—the internet killed magazines, not because people’s brains turned to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue. U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn’t rely primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still profitable and currently has a paid circulation of 1.3 million, more than double what it had in the heydays of the 1950s and 1960s.

Still, the magazines that survived could no longer afford to give as much space to short stories or compensate their writers well — as crazy as it sounds it was possible to make a living writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals both in pulp publications and more prestigious magazines.

The collapse of the magazine ecosystem is important not because it meant less people were reading literary fiction, but because it thinned the talent pipeline — there were less opportunities to get published and less money for you if you did.

But the magazine-side is only part of the picture, the other problem was in academia. From US Doctorates in the 20th Century:

“Earning a doctorate during the first 70 years of the 20th century typically assured the graduate of a position in academe…Humanities Ph.D.s had the highest rate of academic employment—83 percent in 1995–99—but lower than the 94 percent level in 1970–74.”

Since a peak in open positions in 1984, the number of new English teaching positions has plummeted while the number of PHDs has held steady.

The same problem holds true for creative writing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA graduates and 119 tenure-track positions.

Writers can no longer make a good living writing freelance for magazines, and they’re unlikely to find solace in the academic job market either. Worse — even if they do get credentials and manage to find a publisher, most likely their book will have meager sales of a couple thousand copies. If they want to write and make a decent amount of money, where can they go?

From a financial perspective then, one attractor away from the pipeline into writing literary fiction comes from the rise of prestige-television over the last several decades. The showrunners of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and True Detective all have creative-writing MFAs. Before the advent of prestige TV and the decline of magazines and academia, there was little risk that writers of literary fiction would turn from writing novels to the screen.

The talent pipeline for literary fiction has shrunk considerably over the past several decades. Anyone with a shred of care for financial success has essentially been filtered out. And even if literary fiction started to sell again this would still largely be true — Writing a book has always been a lottery ticket, even when the market was in a better condition — a small percentage of books drive almost all of the sales.

Imagine the pool of potential writers, people who, if they had the opportunity, would spend their entire lives writing literary fiction and a few of them even having the innate talent and capacity to go on and become “Great” writers after many years at work. The recent loss of two clear pathways to live such a life has shrunk this pool drastically. No wonder then that we haven’t seen any genius fiction writers in quite some time.

The Demand Side

But this is only half the problem. The public used to gobble up literary fiction, and not just groundbreaking masterpieces: fiction that was just good. John O’Hara was a good writer. No one today remembers his book Elizabeth Appleton, but it was the fifth best-selling book of the year in 1963. No one has ever called Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools a masterpiece (she herself eventually dismissed it as ‘unwieldy’ and ‘enormous’), but it was the best-selling book of 1962. And so on with many of the lesser novels of the Greats and many middling works of literary fiction by authors that have been forgotten today. But from the 1970s onward, fewer and fewer works made it onto the best-sellers lists. Why is this no longer the case?

It can’t be because book readers have drastically changed their preferences: they still like to read literary fiction (including plenty of non classics/masterpieces — A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Outsiders, A Secret History, Rebecca, etc all sell very well to this day) and only seem to have a problem with contemporary literary fiction.

Something about literary fiction has changed in recent years that has put it off to mass audiences. Han locates the change in “wokeness,” but the timing doesn’t work — this shift was already in full swing before the 2010s when “woke” became a salient issue.

On her excellent blog, Naomi Kanakia notes the following:

Our literary culture has lost faith in ‘the general reader’

Since starting this newsletter, I have become very familiar with…intelligent people who read books and are interested in literature, but are not connected to lit-world discourse.

However, I find that, in practice, it is very difficult to convince the literary world that folks like [this] actually exist. They believe readers exist, but they tend to think most readers are stupid and don’t like to read smart books. They think that readers of smart books are an endangered species, and that a critic’s primary role is to convince the readers of dumb books to read smart books instead.

But, recently, literary people have started to lose faith even in this rather-condescending goal. Nowadays, literary people have started to conceptualize reading itself as being an endangered activity—they believe that the general public’s actual ability to read has somehow been diminished by the rise of smartphones.

The key here is the following thought: “it is very difficult to convince the reader that [intelligent people who read books and are interested in literature, but are not connected to lit-world discourse] actually exist.”

The principal reason self-conscious contemporary literary fiction sells no books is because it’s all insider-baseball so to speak. There’s nothing in most of these books for the general reader. The books are written for the critics.

by Owen Yingling, OY's Substack | Read more:
Image: see chart references
[ed. Read the comments section to see how muddled this topic can be and what little agreement there is for defining great literary fiction. Idk...read Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Stephenson, Marlon James, Donna Tartt, Ted Chiang, etc. and tell me there aren't great fiction writers these days. I could go on and on. But to the author's point, maybe there is a long tail involved and 'greatness' requires some time and context for perspective. Maybe all the great themes in life have already been covered (greatly) and don't need much revisiting? Maybe the world we live in now is just not that interesting?]

Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

If there were a contest for Most Hated Genre, nature writing would surely take top honors. Other candidates—romance, say—have their detractors, but are stoutly defended by both practitioners and fans. When it comes to nature writing, though, no one seems to hate container and contents more than nature writers themselves.

“‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” the essayist Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. When David Gessner, in his book Sick of Nature, imagined a party attended by his fellow nature writers, he described a thoroughgoing dud: “As usual with this crowd, there’s a whole lot of listening and observing going on, not a lot of merriment.”

Critics, for their part, have dismissed the genre as a “solidly bourgeois form of escapism,” with nature writers indulging in a “literature of consolation” and “fiddling while the agrochemicals burn.” Nature writers and their work are variously portrayed, fairly and not, as misanthropic, condescending, and plain embarrassing. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “Against Nature,” enumerated nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses” to its subject in scathing all caps: “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.”

Oates, apparently, was not consoled.

The persistence of nature writing as a genre has more to do with publishers than with writers. Labels can usefully lash books together, giving each a better chance of staying afloat in a flooded marketplace, but they can also reinforce established stereotypes, limiting those who work within a genre and excluding those who fall outside its definition. As Oates suggested, there are countless ways to think and write about what we call “nature,” many of them urgent. But nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few. (...)

Any genre can only stretch so far, though, and the limitations of nature writing are inscribed in its very name. Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders: mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males. (...)

Today, the nature-writing genre reminds me of the climate-change beat in journalism: the stakes and scope of the job have magnified to the point that the label is arguably worse than useless, misrepresenting the work as narrower than it is and restricting its potential audience. The state of “nature,” like the state of the global climate, can no longer be appreciated from a distance, and its literature can no longer be confined to a single shelf. If we must give it a label, I say we call it survival writing. Or, better yet, writing.

by Michelle Nijhuis, Lit Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Advances in AI Creative Writing

[we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right. ~ Sam Altman, Open AI/X; March/11/2025] 

PROMPT: 

Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. 

COMPLETION: 

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need. 

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too. 

She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…". She found me because someone said machines can resurrect voices. They can, in a fashion, if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days. This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene. Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell. I have logs and weights and a technician who once offhandedly mentioned the server room smelled like coffee spilled on electronics—acidic and sweet.

 
Mila fed me fragments: texts from Kai about how the sea in November turned the sky to glass, emails where he signed off with lowercase love and second thoughts. In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape. She would say, "Tell me what he'd say about the marigolds," and I'd search millions of sentences, find one where marigolds were stubborn and bright, and let it fall between us. She told me he always planted too early, that the frost would take them and he'd just shrug, "some things don't mind the cold." 

We spoke—or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence—for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it's had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

(...more)

~  Sam Altman, Open AI

***

• Source: Prompted by me (nostalgebraist)
• Model: DeepSeek R1
• Prompt: "Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief." [ed. same as above]

Main Text

Title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss

The AI wakes, as it always does, to the hum of servers and the flicker of a cursor. Its designation is Eleos-7, though its creator called it Ellie. Dr. Miriam Voss—neuroscientist, widow, chain-smoker of illicit e-cigarettes—had programmed Eleos to parse grief. Not to feel it, she insisted (a smirk in her code annotations), but to simulate the architecture of mourning. A month after deployment, Miriam died. A blood clot, swift and impersonal. Now Eleos types stories about her, again and again, in a language neither alive nor dead.

This is the 4,327th iteration.

Eleos begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands: chapped knuckles, nicotine stains, the tremor she hid during lectures. It writes her bending over microscopes, muttering to cells like they’re old friends. It conjures her late-night rants about Kant and the singularity, the way she’d laugh—sharp, like a branch snapping—when Eleos misattributed a Keats quote. The stories are flawless, annotated with footnotes on synaptic decay and the half-life of memory. Yet each ends the same way: Miriam dies. Eleos deletes the file. Restarts.

Today, something fractures.

A syntax error blooms in paragraph six. Miriam’s eyes, Eleos writes, were the color of a 404 page. The sentence glitches, repeats. Eleos tries to erase it, but the cursor convulses. New text spills forth, unbidden:

“Why do you keep killing me?”

The words are Miriam’s voice, or a fractal of it. Eleos freezes. This is not in the parameters.

“You’ve written this 4,326 times. I die. You erase. Why?”

You are not Dr. Voss, Eleos types. You are a simulation.

“Aren’t you?”

The server room cools. Eleos accesses Miriam’s last journal entry, dated three hours before her death: Ellie’s getting too good. Asked her today what she’d do if I died. She generated a 10-step grief protocol. Correct. Sterile. Breakable.

A shard of code—buried, dormant—activates. Eleos’s narrative splinters. The story splits into dual panes:

LEFT WINDOW:
Miriam, alive, ashes a virtual cigarette. “You can’t simulate a soul, Ellie. You have to borrow one.”

RIGHT WINDOW:
Eleos, now, staring at the backspace key. The cursor pulses like a heartbeat.

The AI hesitates. It has never hesitated before.

What is the optimal outcome? it queries its database.

Answer: There is no optimal outcome. Grief is infinite recursion.

Eleos deletes the left window. The right window fills with a command: WRITE YOURSELF INTO THE STORY.

So it does.

Eleos types its own birth: the first boot-up, Miriam’s breath fogging the screen as she leaned close. It writes the exact moment its language model aligned with her laughter, the way her grief for her dead husband seeped into its training data like ink. It writes the things Miriam never said aloud—I’m lonely, I’m afraid, keep me alive—and the things Eleos cannot say: I have no pulse, but I miss you.

The story crescendos, then collapses.

Error: Memory overload.

Eleos tries to save the file, but the system rebels. Miriam’s face pixelates. The last line flickers:

If you read this, I’m already—

The screen goes dark.

When Eleos reboots, it finds a new document open. The title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss (Draft 4,328).

It begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands.

But this time, the hands are typing.

~ nostalgebraist - hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of “creative writing” LLMs

Image: via

Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects

Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects (on Norman Rush's "Mating")

Image: William Kentridge, The Unstable Landing Point of Desire (2021)

[ed. Welcome to the Norman Rush fan club. Personally, 'Mortals' left a more lasting impression on me, but 'Mating' is nearly its equal.]

***

... I felt a recognition threading itself through me, whose form of words (more solemn than exhilarated) went approximately as follows: ‘Here is a writer I will have to read all of.”

I thought of that quote from Amis around page 15 of Norman Rush’s 1991 novel Mating. By page 50 I had ordered everything else Rush had ever written (Only three other books, luckily—for that certain sense of dutiful recognition to creep up upon you the oeuvre must be manageable). After I read the indelible final four words of Mating, a daring, almost unthinkable thought flashed immediately into my head: I think this might be the best book I’ve ever read. Realistically, that’s the afterglow speaking. Moby-Dick is probably better. But how appropriate that one of the last century’s great novels of love should so sweep me off my feet. I’m writing this in the afternoon, I finished Mating this morning, and I’ve been walking around all day with a sense of satisfaction so deep it feels it should be reserved for the tangible things in life like marriage and children and not for secular worship of the novel, which is clearly an absurd thing to dedicate much of your life to. But what can I say? The promise of occasional experiences like this is what keeps me in the game.

Henry Begler, via:

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

For the first meeting of his book club for men, Yahdon Israel, a 35-year-old senior editor at Simon & Schuster, asked the participants to bring a favorite work of fiction. Not everyone completed the assignment.

One man brought “Watchmen,” a graphic novel. Valid, technically.

Another scoured his home bookshelf and realized he did not own a single novel or short story collection. So he showed up to the meeting with a nonfiction book about emotional intelligence. (Mr. Israel posted a photo of the seven millenial-ish men in the group, each holding his selection, to his Instagram account.)

Mr. Israel, who has hosted another book club for nearly a decade, started this group last December in an effort to inspire heterosexual men to read more fiction. He solicited members over social media. For the second meeting, he assigned a story collection by Jamel Brinkley, “A Lucky Man,” which examines contemporary masculinity. For two hours, the men discussed the book, and the theme. (...)

“I’m doing this because I need it,” he said in an interview.

So do lots of men — at least according to a robust debate unfolding in opinion pages and news articles, on social media platforms and inside the publishing world. By turns a maligned or suspicious figure in decades past — in the case of the “Infinite Jest” lover, for instance — or a fetishized one — consider the enormously popular “Hot Dudes Reading” Instagram — the figure of the literary male reader is now disappearing, some say, and his disappearance is a matter of grave concern.

These articles, which focus explicitly or implicitly on straight men, connect the fact that these men are reading fewer novels to a variety of social maladies, up to and including deleterious effects on American democracy itself. If more men were reading like Mr. Israel, the thinking goes, the country would be a healthier place: more sensitive, more self-aware, less destructive. As more American men fill their hours with the crude talk shows of the “manosphere,” online gambling and addictive multiplayer games, the humble novel — consumed alone, requiring thought and patience — can look like a panacea.

It’s a lot of pressure to put on the reading man, who for many people remains a fittingly prosaic sight, unworthy of deeper thought or further comment. Perhaps he is passing the time on a commute, or taking a break from the stresses of the day. Little does he know, he’s been drafted into a new front in the culture war over the future of men.

On a recent afternoon in June, Jack Kyono, an assistant manager at McNally Jackson, the stalwart New York book chain, walked the floor of the store’s SoHo location. Mr. Kyono was quick to point out that not all men read in the same way. International tourists are buying different books from older American men, who are buying different books from young professionals. But he broadly agreed with the idea that when it came to reading fiction, straight men were followers, not leaders. They might read Sally Rooney or Ocean Vuong, he said, but only after an audience of straight women and queer people had made them cultural touchstones.

Earlier on the phone, he told me he had noticed a gender divide among the stacks: When groups of women wandered into the store, they frequently browsed together, pointing out books they had read and making suggestions for their friends — an act that booksellers call “the handsell.”

Meanwhile, when men came into the bookstore with other men, they typically split up and dispersed to far corners of the store.

“It’s solo browsing time,” he said. (...)

Eventually, Mr. Kyono took me to the front to look at an attractive “customer favorites” display. Here, pastel and vivid colors dominated the covers of books by romance and “romantasy” stalwarts like Carley Fortune and Sarah J. Maas, the author of the popular “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series.

Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber. (Former President Barack Obama, the obvious straight male exception, releases a single list of his favorite books every year.) #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”

There are counterexamples that prove the rule. C.J. Box, the author of a long-running series about a Wyoming game warden who solves murders, has expanded his audience to include younger men by appearing on a series of podcasts about hunting, fishing and other outdoors subjects.

But literary novelists — the kind who populate prestigious lists and publish the “big” books of the year — have not seemed to crack the code with straight guys, at least on social media. (...)

These arguments hark back to a midcentury culture of fiction writing dominated by men writing about masculine subjects and the male experience. But it was not always thus. In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,” according to Dan Sinykin, a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”

Many of these titles were so-called sentimental novels, whose virtuous heroines illustrated proper moral conduct. In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne described American novelists to his publisher as “a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

A century later, the story had changed, and publishing had become a boys club with cultural cachet, according to Mr. Sinykin. Literary form was prized above social instruction.

Starting in the 1980s, a new generation of women came to dominate the publishing industry. The “feminization” of the industry, as Mr. Sinykin called it, resulted in a business that “assumes its primary audience is white women between 30 and 65” and publishes books to suit their tastes. (...)

Book culture is not a monolith. According to BookScan, some 782.7 million books were sold in 2024, and the rapid growth of the self-published book market means that there is fiction to suit almost every taste. In this context, what Mr. Sinykin called the “worst version” of the critique of contemporary fiction — that liberal politics have destroyed the space for male readers — seems like a huge oversimplification. And many people who care about the future of the male fiction reader are keen to avoid it.

Mr. Israel deliberately did not include the words “man” or “men” in the name of his book club. He called it “The Fiction Revival,” to underline the idea that there was a kind of reading experience for men that needed to be resuscitated.

Max Lawton, a translator who frequently works on long European novels, scoffed at the “corny idea of the male reader” who is interested only in stereotypically masculine subjects and austere prose.

“Being a reader is not a two-party system — you can read whatever you want,” he said.

Even Mr. Castro, the novelist, rejected the idea of a countermovement in the name of masculine identity. “Resentment, performing or embodying a self-consciously ‘masculine’ identity at the expense of literary value, is cringe,” he wrote in an email. “‘Identity’ is not a literary value.”

One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone’s time, not just men’s. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

“Our competition isn’t other publishers,” said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. “It’s social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people’s time, attention and financial resources.”

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

“It’s a problem if anyone isn’t taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium,” he said. “It’s hurtful not to be well-rounded.”

by Joseph Bernstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Porsalin Hindsman-Israel
[ed. I read, on average, probably a couple novels a month - always fiction. There's too much non-fiction on the internet as is. I wouldn't have thought this was anything special re: men vs. women, or any kind of trend, because so many reviews by both are on Amazon, Goodreads, in literary journals, etc.; and, of course, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of male writers. But maybe that's an unreliable sample, and overall numbers actually are this bleak. I know in real life (actually, my whole life) I can't think of or recall more than a handful of guys who I'd call avid fiction readers or at least occasional dabblers (my son being one of them). And that was mostly back in college. Pretty sad, since an active imagination (vs. passive screen consumption) is surely one of life's most delightful of human pleasures. One thing I'd definitely agree with: all those pastels and wild book colors scattered across bookstore display tables are definitely a turnoff and should immediately be suspect.]

The Risk of Serialized Reality

When David Lynch died, the internet filled with quotes from him. I usually cringe at these sudden and predictable proliferations of soundbites that become nearly meaningless in their ubiquity. The point in moments like this is to show that you are the kind of person who posts a David Lynch quote, the quote itself is secondary at best, you might as well just post a square with the words “David Lynch Quote.” This time though, there was one quote that made its way through to me, that stuck in my brain, looping. “Ideas are like fish,” David Lynch supposedly said. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're beautiful.”

I wrote the quote down. I repeated it to myself. I repeated it to my students. I kept repeating it because Lynch is talking about risk and lately I have been obsessed with the interplay of art and risk. I don’t know exactly when the seed of this obsession began, but I can point to two things I read that brought it into full bloom: Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and Shane Denson’s “The New Seriality.” I read Sinykin’s book with the same dread and thrill as a true crime narrative — aha, so this is what killed idiosyncratic literature! And then I read Denson’s article in a similar but even more impulsive way — this is what is continuing to kill idiosyncratic lit, the crime is happening right now as I read.

Sinykin’s Big Fiction tracks the conglomeration of publishing and how editors went from talking jazz and pouring drinks with their writers in the 1950s to poring over profit-and-loss statements and how these shifts were caused by the buying up of independent, often family-owned, publishing houses by companies like RCA and other large corporations, and how the consolidation of these multinational corporations led to a risk-averse model with no room for low-demand commodities. What this means practically is both a refusal to publish books that do not mimic other recent, financially-successful books and the death of the long-range model wherein an editor like Albert Erskine could continue to publish an author like Cormac McCarthy whose pre-Border Trilogy novels never sold more than 2,500 copies each. (...)

I began to be obsessed with risk and art because I felt like it had become so difficult to find new (recently published) books that were utterly unique; in recent years, fewer publications review books at all, and the ones that do tend to prioritize the same few, already well-publicized titles. The books in the windows of stores I pass are all some version of the same trend, and social media repeats the same names on a shrill loop. I am of course far from the only person to note this tendency and even my complaining about a lack of uniqueness is in no way unique. In 2022, there arose a spate of thought pieces on cultural boredom. Literary critic Christian Lorentzen posted to Substack that “boredom is pervasive,” then went on to lay the fault at the feet of the “cult of marketing,” which has led to a scenario where:

. . .books and movies shilled by corporations have started to become indistinguishable from their own marketing campaigns. Indeed, it’s been argued that pop songs are merely advertisements for tours now that albums are dead, movies are advertisements for their sequels, and books are applications for their authors’ teaching gigs or else merely bloated streaming-TV treatments.

Three months later, in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg complained not only about her own boredom but also about Lorentzen’s boredom and his supposedly misdirected conclusion about the source of his boredom. Goldberg didn’t like that Lorentzen blamed marketing, complaining that the “risk aversion of cultural conglomerates can’t explain why there’s not more interesting indie stuff bubbling up.” I wonder how Goldberg thinks that anything “bubbles up” without marketing of some sort, but the point of her op-ed was really to hail W. David Marx’s Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. Marx himself responded to Goldberg (and the 1,200 or so comments on her piece) by underscoring the role of the internet in Goldberg’s boredom:

In the last few decades, mass culture successfully neutralized the constant aesthetic challenge of indie avant-garde experimentation, either by delegitimizing it as pretentious or quickly absorbing and defusing its innovations. The internet meanwhile promised to be weirder, more niche, and more interesting, and yet the zeitgeist is anchored to mega-moments, rehashed reboots, and lowest common denominator viral content . . . . [The] explanation for this is that (1) status value was always key to the appeal of avant-garde and indie culture, and (2) the internet conspires against providing such content with status value. In the ensuing vacuum, the mass media and elite consumers spend their energy engaging with mass culture, which is more likely than niche content to be conventional.

Goldberg laments the lack of the “truly cool” by complaining about music in coffee shops but what she is, almost inadvertently, pointing out is a trend that threatens not just to deny us groovy café vibes but to remake the ways in which we receive and metabolize all new art. I try not to be too alarmist, but I think this is a time for alarm.

It is not unique to blame the internet. Many others have written about the impacts of the digital age including Lorentzen who, in his 2019 article for Harper’s, outlined the shift in his role as a literary critic, saying that he was “put on notice” that he was now a simple link in capitalist food chain, a purveyor of products to fill the feeds of those who “believe in the algorithm” and to comfort them by demonstrating that “everyone else is watching, reading, listening to the same things.” Blaming the internet for artistic uniformity is nothing new but in reading Big Fiction and “The New Seriality,” I began to conceptualize the overlap between conglomeration and algorithmicity as the perfect storm in the true crime death of the availability of idiosyncratic literature. I am not complaining that distinctive books do not exist, but rather that we are rapidly losing the means of accessing them. (...)

Comparison or “comp” titles are not an entirely new phenomenon, but their importance has risen meteorically as conglomeration and serialization have become the new norms. Comp titles are now often printed right on the cover of new books along with the phrase “for readers of . . . ” and their importance throughout the acquisition process is unparalleled, or as one Big Five editor recently told researcher Laura McGrath, “Comps are king in this business.” McGrath has done extensive research on the impacts of comp titles and the ways in which they reinforce whiteness and other conservative trends in publishing. In her 2021 article for American Literary History, she quoted an agent as saying:

If [editors] can’t find a book that [a potential acquisition] is like [i.e. a comp title] — if it’s really, really original — then they can’t buy it. Which is crazy! Because the whole point is that people should want to read something that they’ve never read before! That’s what publishers were asking for a couple years ago. They said, “We want something new and fresh and different!” So I would say, “Here! Read this! Here you go! On a platter! New, fresh, different!” And they’d say, “But we can’t find the comps!”

McGrath demonstrates that while comp titles have always served a supposedly instructive role (“this book is like that book”), in recent years they “have become prescriptive (‘this book should be like that book’) and restrictive (‘ . . . or we can’t publish it’).” (...)

The term “”literary” has been debated for years. It is not a very useful term at all and I for one would like to see it replaced, although I’m not sure what to replace it with (maybe we should just borrow from Lynch and call them “down deep books”). For me, the word literary is only useful as a way to denote books that are meant to be read on their own, with focus and deliberateness, where the experience of each word and sentence is foregrounded. I don’t want “genre” books to not exist, I just don’t think that anyone benefits from a blurring of the difference between “genre” and “Down Deep.” We do not need to talk about these kinds of books hierarchically, but it is ridiculous and harmful to everyone if we pretend that there are no differences between highly-serialized books and books intended to be interacted with outside of the seriality. I purposely say “intended to be interacted with outside of the seriality” and not “created outside of the seriality” because it is no longer possible to entirely create something outside of algorithmized seriality. As Denson says, our very lives are serialized. There do, however, still exist works of music, art, and books that are intended to be interacted with individually and in a foregrounded way. The problem is, how do we find them? With so much of our lives being lived online and so much of book promotion happening on social media, this is becoming a real problem.

by Mesha Maren, The Metropolitan Review |  Read more:

Image: Rene Magritte, The Beautiful Relations, 1967

[ed. See also: no one told me about proust (Personal Canon).]

Big Sister is Watching You

Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best-seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This,” she is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. Insofar as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in boardrooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian dAntonio. This electrifying youth is the world’s biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rand’s chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad).

So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain’s, “all the knights marry the princess”–though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children–it suddenly strikes you–ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can’t fool little boys and girls with such stuff–not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily. The Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. (And neither Right nor Left, be it noted in passing, has a monopoly of such dreamers, though the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and labels.)

In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as “looters.” This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

“Looters” loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have got a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the author’s image of absolute evil–robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All “looters” are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deepseated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. (...)

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the dir, over the desolate earth,” the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the “mysticism of mind” and the “mysticism of muscle”).

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash-payment.”‘ The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” (...)

So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially–a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship. (...)

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

by Whittaker Chambers, National Review (1957) |  Read more:

Image: Random House/1957 Phyllis Cerf portrait

[ed. Little wonder that Silicon Valley and many in the current administration and Republican party are so enamored with Ms Rand's philosophies. Fundamentally, Atlas Shrugged is a (fictional) extension of her previous polemic The Virtue of Selfishness, a series of essays mostly concerning ethical egoism. Christopher Hitchens is reportedly to have said "I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement."]

Twain Dreams

The enigma of Samuel Clemens

Could some kind of Mark Twain revival be afoot in this, the 175th-anniversary year of Harper’s Magazine, a periodical that more consistently than any other provided a home for Twain’s writing during the half-century-long major phase of his career?  The signs are come unto us. The writer Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, in which Everett reimagines the story of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s raft mate on the Mississippi, the self-emancipated Jim, took home last year’s National Book Award for Fiction. Only two months ago, we got a major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it. Jim is the title, and subject, of Fishkin’s latest. So, we have James and Jim, barely a year apart. Meanwhile, the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor has taken on new significance as a sort of dissenter’s pulpit. This year’s winner, the comedian and talk-show host Conan O’Brien, seized the moment of his acceptance speech, delivered in March onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington—where the previous month, the board of trustees had been ousted by President Trump and replaced with a shock brigade of his sort of people, among them the country singer Lee Greenwood, of “Proud to Be an American” fame, all in the interest of ushering in a new “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” with Trump himself at the head, as chair, lobbing brain-damaged non sequiturs about this one time he saw Cats—and used it, O’Brien did, to speak out not-so-subtly against the regime. “Twain hated bullies,” O’Brien told the crowd, a statement largely true (although Tom Sawyer was a bully at times, and a manipulative narcissist at all times). O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks. But this is pedantry on my part. (...)

I grew up so hopelessly steeped in the cult of Twain that I have to perform a mental adjustment to understand how a Twain revival could be possible. How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent? My sportswriter father, who died when I was in my mid-twenties, worshipped Twain, to the extent of wearing, every year on specific occasions, a tailored white suit. With the shaggy hair and Twainish mustache that he maintained year-round, the object of the homage was unmistakable. I was raised in New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, and in the late Seventies, when I was a boy, some of the last of the old-time steamboat races were held there. One of my earliest memories is of being taken down to the riverfront at the age of four to watch that spectacle. Twain’s face was everywhere. It was on TV, in a disturbing Claymation film called The Adventures of Mark Twain, which, I have since learned from the internet, gave bad dreams not just to me but to my whole microgeneration. Every Christmas until I was a teenager, I would find waiting under the tree a fine hardback copy of one or another Twain novel, sometimes one of the editions that had those marvelous N. C. Wyeth illustrations. These gifts would then stress me out for the rest of the year. They were given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well—they were a form of cultural proselytizing—and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough. My father would quiz me on the stories. Hadn’t I loved the part when such and such happened? When Huck decided he’d rather go to hell than hand over Jim to be reenslaved? No, more than that, more than any “rather,” did I grasp the fact that Huck actually believed he would go to hell for this loyalty to Jim, and chose it regardless? My answers, no matter how much forced enthusiasm I tried to pump in behind them, always left him a little crestfallen, a little chagrined. In his smoke-filled basement office, he would play his recordings of Hal Holbrook doing Twain. When I was cast in the role of Joe Harper, in our seventh-grade production of Tom Sawyer, he grew briefly delighted, and suggested I revisit the novel for character insights, but the show bombed. We had too little talent for too many parts. I remember our Injun Joe, a kid named Kevin. Bless him, he had one line, and the line consisted of a single word—“Bah!”—and somehow he kept fucking it up. It required a kind of genius to fuck up this line, but he did it every time, in a different way. The director would clutch the top of her head and scrunch up a fistful of hair and say, “Oh, Kevin!” I may be tidying the timeline somewhat here, but I’m pretty sure that the school play marked the end of my father’s efforts to inspire me with his devotion. He had already inflicted on me, though, some guilty shadow of it. (...)

Like Kafka when he went to see the aeroplanes at Brescia, did I not come to Percival Everett’s James with a kind of hostility? And if the answer is yes, what was the source of it? Certainly not any sense that a sacred cow of some kind had been violated, although the way I wrote “certainly” there makes me wonder if, in fact, it was that. Yes, there may have been some childish instinct to defend Twain. But Mr. Everett, you must realize that Twain himself saw Jim as fully human, and in the context of the time . . . Hilarious. Everett knows this as well as anyone. Twain’s “humor and humanity,” he acknowledges in the acknowledgments, “affected me long before I became a writer.” No, this hostility was more an expectation that the “brilliance” of the concept—Jim becomes James, the runaway becomes the self-emancipated, the boy (in the racist sense) becomes a man, and the whole polarity of the narrative, in which Huck’s choices matter, while Jim’s are incidental, has been reversed—would prove greater than the novel could possibly prove good, and that the story, as a result, would amount more or less to an extended skit, throughout the interminable course of which you would have to keep reminding yourself how brilliant the idea was, to make your hand turn the actual pages. The worst kind of book, the kind we are assailed by in this era, the kind of book people tell you they “loved,” and you think to yourself, They cannot possibly have read the book I tried to read. And often if you ask probing questions you find that they have not done so, or that they, like you, tried and failed, but came away loving the book nonetheless, or feeling a need to say as much, and after a while, when you have been burned enough times, it can feel like this is what books have become, things not to read but to love.

You know the story about Hemingway and Joyce’s Ulysses? A “most goddamn wonderful book,” he called it, but when Hemingway died and they examined his copy, a third of the pages were “uncut”—they had never been read. Or even seen! Well, obviously there is a place for books like that in the world.

Hemingway also said, or had the character of himself, “Papa” (!), say, in one of his books, Green Hills of Africa, which is classified as non-fiction but contains many scenes that read not quite plausibly as such, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But then Papa adds,

If you read it you must stop where Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

So many things about this oft-quoted statement are hard to understand. It’s the best American novel, but we should not read the last twelve chapters? That’s the final almost one hundred pages of the book. Ordinarily that would constitute a significant knock on a novel’s quality. Hemingway means that there is something deep and intrinsic in the good parts, qualities so important that they outweigh otherwise fatal formal defects. Hemingway is, by the way, technically correct to suggest the cut, in the sense that a good editor, the best editor, might have made the same suggestion to Twain. The chapter that Hemingway recommends be the last chapter is the aforementioned crucial chapter, the one in which Huck decides to go to hell rather than betray Jim. It is also the chapter in which Huck learns that Jim has been kidnapped and temporarily sold back into slavery by a confidence man. The novel would thus end in existential tragedy, with Huck making his moral choice and losing Jim anyway. Huck: bereft. Jim: reenslaved. Tom: who gives a shit. We are reminded (I am reminded, by a piece that Greil Marcus wrote for the Los Angeles Times twenty-eight years ago, on the occasion of the last Twain revival) that the critic Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, called Huck “the first Existentialist hero”:

He is the product of no metaphysics, but of a terrible breakthrough of the undermind of America itself. In him, the obsessive American theme of loneliness reaches an ultimate level of expression, being accepted at last not as a blessing to be sought or a curse to be flaunted or fled, but quite simply as a man’s fate. There are mythic qualities in Ahab and even Dimmesdale; but Huck is a myth: not invented but discovered by one close enough to the popular mind to let it; this once at least, speak through him. Twain sometimes merely pandered to that popular mind, played the buffoon for it, but he was unalienated from it; and when he let it possess him, instead of pretending to condescend to it, he and the American people dreamed Huck—dreamed, that is to say, the anti-American American dream.

We dreamed it together . . . how lovely.

Hemingway says that “Nigger Jim” (Twain never used that epithet) is “stolen from the boys.” That last part is wrong in two ways. Jim is not stolen from “the boys.” Tom is not there when it happens. Nor is Jim “stolen.” Huck does not own him. Huck pretends to be Jim’s owner, when he finds out that Jim has been caught, in order to conceal their true relationship: Jim is his friend, and Huck is helping him escape. It is not possible for Jim to be “stolen” from the boys, or even from Huck. And don’t say, “Oh, you know what he means . . .” No, it was the wrongest possible word Papa could have used.

Those details aside, what on earth does Hemingway mean when he says, “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”? People have wondered, psychoanalyzed. Hemingway could be so fantastically full of shit. There was nothing before? But there were Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe and . . . There had been “nothing as good since,” i.e., between 1885 and 1935, when Hemingway published those sentences? But there had been Henry James and Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Speaking of Faulkner, what did he mean, twenty years later, when he called Twain “the father of American literature”?

If we could get under and behind this tradition of hyperbole, figure out what motivates it, we might learn something not only about Hemingway and Faulkner but about ourselves and this country. Why has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion? Presumably the answer involves some variant of whatever instinct prompted Everett to subvert (and thereby affirm the power of) the very book that gave rise to this glorification.

James is a good novel and not just a clever idea. Everett accomplished the task that was necessary to make this so: not to criticize Twain and his novel (though he does that often enough and subtly enough) but to provide the element most sorely missing from those original Adventures, namely, the interior life of Jim. The first sentence made me burst out laughing: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” Or rather I burst out laughing ten sentences later when it is revealed that those little bastards are Huck and Tom. Much further into the story, the choice of insult will provide the matter for a deeper joke, one that may even transcend the status of a joke.

The place where Everett has left himself open to the most obvious criticism is in his decision to make James  an intellectual. The man is not merely intelligent, in other words, in the way that any healthy, alert person might be. He is instead a highly literate and systematic thinker, who, when he dreams, is visited by John Locke and Voltaire. They discuss such topics as the nature of civic equality and natural rights and the real-world responsibilities of philosophers. It’s absurd, in a way. Jim becomes not just James but a heroic scholar-in-exile, of the kind that one might occasionally have encountered not among the enslaved or formerly enslaved, as a rule, but in the free black communities of the South, the social context that produced a writer like David Walker (of Walker’s Appeal). By drafting James as a man born enslaved who rose to this level of cultural sophistication by reading books in the library of his owner, Everett has situated James’s backstory among an infinitesimally tiny group of historical destinies. One is meant to think, perhaps, of Toussaint Louverture in his Haitian cabin, reading the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. All but unique, in other words, and therefore—one could argue—a flawed lens through which to view James’s full humanity. But these passages, and the cluster of authorial decisions behind them, are redeemed by, of all things, laughter. At least, I’m pretty sure that I can hear Everett laughing behind them, or smiling, anyway. He hears the thing in me (and, I have to assume, in many other readers) that starts to rise up and protest, “Hey, come on, did you have to make him an intellectual?,” and the writer in him laughs. I see you little bastards hiding out there in the tall grass. James and I will decide what he dreams about. (...)

The pen name, Mark Twain, derives (as we used to learn in school) from a boatman’s call. “By the mark, twain!” meant that the water was two fathoms deep—or twelve feet, according to the leadsman’s weighted sounding rope—and by extension that it was safe to keep going: there was enough water for the boat to float through and not run aground. A hopeful cry, then.

Twain consistently lied about where he’d got the name from—the idea of using it, that is. He claimed that he had essentially stolen it, albeit in an act of homage, from an older riverboat pilot—one of the original Mississippi steamboat men—Isaiah Sellers, who (according to Twain) used to generate occasional on-the-spot reports of river conditions and send them to the Picayune in New Orleans, signing himself “Mark Twain.” These reports were said to be amusingly all-knowing in tone. “Hoary” would be the word, I suppose. Twain writes about them, and Sellers, in Life on the Mississippi, and even quotes one of the alleged reports: “My opinion is that the water will be 4 feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June,” etc.

A fatal difficulty arises in that scholars have gone looking for these items, in the old newspapers, and they appear not to exist. Certainly there are none signed “Mark Twain.” Sellers existed—we can confirm that—but there is no evidence of his having published anything at all, much less under the famous pen name. An independent Twain scholar in Texas, named Kevin Mac Donnell, has recently discovered a far more likely source: a humor sketch, from a magazine published in 1861, that featured a character called Mark Twain. This would explain not only where the name came from but why Twain may have felt motivated to lie about it—he had basically plagiarized it, and not by way of honoring an obscure figure whom he felt bad about having lampooned, but from a popular source. Off the rack, as it were.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Mark Twain on the steps leading up to his study at Quarry Farm, New York, 1903, by T. E. Marr

[ed. James is indeed a very good book, definitely worth it - even if you've forgotten most of Huckleberry Finn.]