The 25 Science-Fiction Books You Must Read, Ranked

And six short story collections

Some ‘best of’ lists seek to achieve a spurious objectivity through means such as reader polls, complex ranking systems or asking distinguished experts for their views.

This is not one of those lists. This list has instead been compiled by the greatly superior method1 of me thinking really hard about it and assuming that my opinion mattered more than anyone else’s.

In terms of criteria, firstly, every book on the list is an excellent read. Some of the books on here may be worthy, but there are no books on here purely for their worthiness. Secondly, every book is one that will make you think, or open your eyes to a new perspective - for that is a core function of science fiction, to explore new possibilities. And thirdly, to whittle the list down to 25, I have taken into account relevance and impact - either to the world of today, or to the genre more broadly.

While the borders of every genre are porous, every book on here has a clear claim to being science fiction. There is no pure fantasy, or alternate history - much though I enjoy those genres, this is not their list.

So, without further ado, let’s get cracking. As is traditional, we’ll do this in reverse order, so you’re kept guessing to the very end as to whether I’m overlooking your own favourites, or saying they’re amongst the best.

Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon (1930)

A future history, not a novel, Stapledon takes us forward across billions of years as new races of humanity rise and fall - on Earth, on Venus and ultimately on Neptune. Some winged, some more intelligent and some less intelligent, some deliberately designed and some evolved, each have their turn on the stage. [...]

The Mote in God’s Eye - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1974)

What happens when you combine Niven’s extraordinary imagination with Pournelle’s ability to actually tell a story that has a plot? You get The Mote in God’s Eye, perhaps the best first-contact encounter with a truly alien extra-terrestrial species ever written, in a richly rendered future setting. A rare occasion of a joint-authored novel being better than any that either has written alone. [...]

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham (1951)

What if almost everyone went blind, and sentient, walking, carnivorous plants inherited the earth? This unlikely premise forms the basis for one of the most civilly bleak post-apocalyptic novels, as the protagonist and his companion wend their way across the devastated Home Counties, seeking a safe haven where the remnants of humanity can survive. [...]

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson (1995)

A world of nanotechnology and AI, in which nation states have been supplanted by ‘phyles’ - groupings, sometimes ethnic, sometimes regional, sometimes political, of freely associating individuals - the Diamond Age tells the story of Nell, a young girl growing up in poverty who receives an advanced AI ‘primer’, designed to educate and guide its owner into a ‘more interesting life’. A wildly imaginative roller-coaster ride through a provocative future. [...]

The Warrior’s Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)

Arguably the best science-fiction author currently writing, The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the brilliant, driven, physically stunted Miles Vorkosigan, primary protagonist of her Vorkosigan Saga, and follows him as he ‘accidentally’ builds himself a mercenary fleet. Modern space opera at its finest. [...]

Foundation - Isaac Asimov (1951)

A novel that shaped the genre, Foundation tells the story of a Galactic Empire in decline, the brilliant psychohistorian who sees a way to minimise the harm - and the lives of those who followed him, living his plan, guiding the new Foundation in its ascent. [...]

The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin (2008)

by Edrith, World of Edrith |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Not a bad list. Could easily be doubled.]

Annie Dillard, Meditative Author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ Dies at 81

Annie Dillard, who as a young American writer walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” died Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 81.

Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. No further details were given.

With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a bestselling autobiography and another bestseller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.

Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to understand it as a 20th-century analogue to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” This was no coincidence: Dillard had chosen Thoreau as the subject of her master’s thesis at Hollins University, the women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Virginia.

Like Thoreau, she found an unremarkable body of water to be as good a place as any for deep thoughts — particularly about how to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with nature’s cruelty.

Unlike Thoreau, Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.

That she was a photogenic young woman coming to grips with raw nature — a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards — was undeniably part of the Dillard mystique. So was her insistence that, in spite of her patient, unflinching observations on flora and fauna, she wasn’t a nature writer, but rather a theologian looking high and low for God. [...]

“Tinker Creek” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1975, and Dillard was overwhelmed by requests for speeches, interviews and television appearances. Her looks were thought by many media outlets to be as newsworthy as her writing — so much so that she was ridiculed in some circles as “Cheesecake at Tinker Creek.”

Repelled by the consequences of her success, she moved to Washington state and began dividing her time between the city of Bellingham and the islands Waldron and Lummi. Her marriage to Richard Dillard had ended in amicable divorce, and in the Pacific Northwest, she found privacy enough to regain the concentration essential to her work.

“The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water,” she wrote. “There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.”

 

by Daniel Lewis, NY Times via Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Rollie McKenna
[ed. Just learned about Annie's death this morning. One of my all-time favorite books is The Living (a fictional depiction of the evolution of Whatcom county, the area around Bellingham, WA). See also: Annie Dillard brought poetry into prose, pioneering a mystical form of creative nonfiction (The Conversation):]

***

Not all writing is the same. Prose typically features continuous sentences arranged in paragraphs. Poetry tends to be differentiated from prose by a deliberate organization of language that’s not determined by the page itself.

Prose poetry, the lyric essay and other hybrid forms of literature play at the intersection of genre, which usually defines these separate categories of writing. Creative nonfiction likewise aims to accurately convey reality while emphasizing literary style. The literary features of creative nonfiction are often drawn from fiction, with devices such as dialogue, scene and flashback.

But one of the distinctions of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction is how much her prose owes to poetry.

Poetry can be defined in many ways, but it tends to be characterized by honed, heightened language. Poems are often noted for their memorable images, rich sounds and foregrounding of emotion. Dillard’s nonfiction is shot through with images that arrest readers with their beauty or confront readers with their terror – as in her Harper’s essay “The Death of a Moth,” where the insect is drawn to a candle flame, becomes stuck in the wax and is transformed into a burning wick. In Dillard’s words:

“She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

It’s no accident that Dillard describes herself as reading the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud by the light of the moth. She previously wrote that she loved how language sounds in French symbolist poetry, and Rimbaud was known to combine prose with his poetry in a way Dillard herself does.

Lost Child

He said, Come with me! Take Daddy’s hand.

How all the stories begin. A large hand lowered, your small hand lifted.

She isn’t sure, she admits, exactly what happened.

Or when. She knows that she was little.

Maybe four years old. Maybe three.

Just guessing. Mists of time, thinly whitewashed wall of memory . . .

No. Katherine does remember something about when. For today—Thursday, March 12, 2026—is an anniversary of that day.

It was, Take Daddy’s hand but hurry. Something was going to happen—unless it had already happened.

For, with Kit’s father, something was always either going to happen or had already happened, and it was either too late to stop it from happening or too early to even imagine it happening, but, in any case, Hurry, sweetie! God damn.

Not used to dressing herself. The new rosy-pink raincoat, crookedly buttoned, but maybe Daddy wouldn’t notice.

Hours later, at the hospital, parking at the rear—a high-rise garage, which Kit’s father hated because it slowed him down, Fucking God damn.

Kit cringed a little when Daddy spoke in a harsh voice, but she understood: Daddy was not talking to her.

When they were alone together—which was often now—Daddy joked that the two of them were practically living in this shithole car. Daddy was rarely silent; he was too nervous, edgy, to be silent. He seemed to be addressing Kit, but Kit knew that he would be annoyed if she interrupted him to reply.

Crucial to Kit not to annoy her father. If she was sweetly quiet, obedient, Daddy smiled at her with the radiance of Daddy love, and Kit basked in his love like a cat stretched out in the sun.

Kit’s fear was that Daddy’s smile would disappear. Like a light switched off.

You would have to have known him to understand, Katherine says.

Cursing as he made his way up through the parking garage, turning the wheel sharply, row after row of vehicles, nowhere to park, though the sign at the entrance had said “Open.”

True that Daddy was in a hurry, but true, also, that, when Daddy at last found a parking space, on the top level of the garage, he did not drive into it head first but took time to maneuver the vehicle around so that he could back it in. Daddy felt compelled always to back into a parking space; here, an alarmingly narrow gap between two large vehicles which required many excruciating minutes, Daddy grimacing as he peered into the car’s side mirrors, easing back a few inches, then forward again. His breathing came fast. His forehead glistened with moisture.

Rainwater in puddles on the garage floor. Slow-drifting fog, mist.

The smell of her father’s breath, like fumes.

In the back seat of the car, a potted plant, its blooms wrapped in crinkly cellophane, amid random newspapers, napkins, coffee cups. Also, a small suitcase so stuffed that one of the compartments was only partly zipped.

C’mon, silly. Nothing to be afraid of.

Kit smiled uncertainly. For Daddy was smiling. Nothing to be afraid of? It had not occurred to Kit that there might be something to be afraid of.

by Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Holly Andres

The Man Who Saw Humanity From Two Billion Years Away

Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.

“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”

In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”

This inspirational moment is an abductive, metaphoric leap. Quite distinct from the plodding extrapolative logic that gives us jet packs, automated cars, and other low-hanging fruit of the imagination, prevalent in the pulp sf writing of the same era and reheated in the corporate imaginations of our contemporary tech executives.

Stapledon’s imagination is profuse. He can be read as a compendium of science fiction ideas: his “Odd John” (1935) with its homo superior and titular telepathic character seeds the ground for Marvel’s X-Men; in “Star Maker” (1937) he describes the stellar structure that Freeman Dyson conceptualized as the Dyson sphere; in “Last and First Men” and its sequel, 1932’s “Last Men in London,” human evolution is driven across millennia to produce telepathy, as in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”; in the age of the Fifth Men, the Moon is destroyed and falls to Earth, raining down destruction and driving further evolution of the species — Neal Stephenson’s masterful pan-generational novel “Seveneves” is powered by the same conceit.

A further astonishing influence, traced by the scholar Dominic Moran, is upon Jorge Luis Borges and his short story “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” (1941), or “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Borges reviewed Stapledon and went on to cite a section of “Star Maker” that anticipates the idea of the multiverse. The “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics would not be proposed until 1957, nearly 20 years after Stapledon’s speculation of a creature capable of taking many possible courses of action at once, with each choice creating a new dimension in time.

The long future of “Last and First Men” is influenced by the interwar concern with deep time. Doris Lessing observed that surely what was going on in archaeology in the period inspired Stapledon: The early 20th century was marked by the rediscovery of civilizations such as the Olmec mother culture in the Americas, the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and the excavation of the Hittite capital that proved they were a genuine civilization and not solely a Biblical one. Lessing’s own science fiction sequence, “Canopus in Argos: Archives,” first published in 1979, is a similarly eon-spanning future history.

The different generations of Stapledon’s humankind evolve under pressure from cultural and environmental effects. Their advances leave a mark on the Earth, and the Earth violently reacts. This anticipates a key theme of the 21st century, the Anthropocene, the theory that humanity has left evidence of itself in the geological record, thus making our mark in deep time. [...]

Universal significance is certainly a concern of Stapledon’s: His letters and articles in the early years of the First World War seek it in his war experience. Stapledon served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, a third choice outside of the binary of being a soldier or a conscientious objector. To volunteer, he adapted his car — a roomy grey Lanchester that he learned to drive along the narrow lanes of the Wirral — into an ambulance and drove to the front, signing up in Dunkirk. He was joined by Lewis Fry Richardson, the mathematician who would later find fame for his work on meteorological prediction but at the time was working on an equation to predict the end of the conflict. Their unit was attached to a French infantry division moving from the ruined port town of Nieuport, where the barbed wire straggled down to the North Sea, to a convoy camp in Flanders.

On a warm September night in 1915, Stapledon took a stretcher, a sleeping bag, and a leather rug from the car to sleep under the stars. He lay down and marveled at the Milky Way, at the Pleiades and Jupiter. The distant guns fell silent. He tried to see the stars as they truly are, to comprehend the spatial, temporal, and moral depths of the starfield.

What followed was a reverie of cosmic consciousness that underpins “Last and First Men” and his later masterpiece, “Star Maker.” In the vision, his beloved cousin Agnes sang his name and appeared to him; they soared to the heavens together; planets fell away; the sun diminished to a mere star. He saw all the suns, all the planets, all the living beings. The earth was far away; from space, he could see the trenches and battle lines and the souls of the soldiers. In an instant of cosmic consciousness, he saw the “strange noble beings of other worlds” and “of each one we felt ‘It is I.’” [...]

“Last and First Men” is not progressive. Civilizations rise and fall, the tide of progress advances and retreats, variants upon the theme of humanity strike up and diminish — what endures of humanity is not spirit in the Christian sense so much as, in the philosophy of the Fifth Men, “a work of tragic art.” The Fifth Men regarded the cosmos as an aesthetic unity in four dimensions. Art focuses aspects of the cosmos, making it apprehensible even if its complexity means that it can never be entirely known.

by Matthew De Abaitua, MIT Press |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I've had Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker on my coffee table for like, forever it seems. When there's nothing to do or I need to take a book somewhere for temporary diversion, like a doctor's appointment, I'll pick it up and read a few chapters. It's not light reading, and the time scale it covers - billions of years - is pretty daunting. But it's well written and thought provoking throughout.]

I’d Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasn’t for These DEI Hires

You know, I wouldn’t say this to just anyone. I’m not one to gam and gossip around the old grog-cooler. But I know you’re a good New England boy working your hardest to crew this vessel just like me, so let’s talk straight.

Be honest: Have you noticed the harpooners getting a little more… ethnic these past few voyages?

Look, I’ve got nothing against Queequeg. He’s a nice guy. And he can spy a whale spout in a hurricane. And swim like a dolphin. And hit a nickel-sized moving target in open water in one steel stroke. But all those “biggee” tattoos? Tell me they don’t scream “diversity hire.”

Yeah, last week, he did leap into the ocean to save me from drowning. What’s your point?

All I’m saying is that I could spear just as many whales until they spout black blood as Queequeg can. If they gave me the chance. But Quakers will do anything to look progressive. And you know they were just shitting themselves to find the one buff Polynesian guy who looks like George Washington.

(Plus, with that mopey twink of his as a spousal hire, he’s kind of a two-fer. Bildad and Peleg are getting a lot of bang for their buck.)

I am not “monomaniacally fixated on Queequeg”! Keep that Billy Budd shit to yourself. I’m just telling you that it’s getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the ships’ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus. (Most of us don’t even get names! “Old Manx Sailor”? The disrespect.)

Fine, take the other harpooners. Tashtego. You know he’s just here because of his “vanishing tribe” Martha’s Vineyard street cred. Makes the hunt look more “authentic.” But if he’s been honing ancestral knowledge of whaling since reaching manhood, would you say he’s really earned it?

And you know that Daggoo is just coasting on his vertical. Anyway, remember that time that Spanish wag said the lightning flash was just “Daggoo showing his teeth,” and Daggoo clenched his fist? Thug behavior. I’d be so much more professional.

I’m not even going to bring up Fedallah leaving us all the grunt work while he posts up with Ahab in his private quarters. Must be nice.

It’s not about prejudice: it’s the principle of the thing! A whaleship should be a meritocracy. One that recognizes my superior merit. [...]

I’m not saying that our harpooners are categorically unqualified. Mostly. All I mean is they seem to have gotten themselves a much quicker route up the corporate mainmast than the rest of us poor salts. And no one’s talking about it.

Riddle me this: if this is a colorblind vessel, then why is the only whale Ahab cares about killing the white one? Did you think about that?

This isn’t just about me! This is about all of us. The French Sailor. The Icelandic Sailor. And, you know, the other ones. Just because we can’t fetch a good market price in Alabama doesn’t mean we don’t have value! And yet we must watch our chances for advancement slide through our fingers like raw spermaceti.

Old Ahab apparently thinks ivory is good enough to stand on, but not enough to promote. What a racket. Sure, Queequeg just downed another five whales while I was talking and is single-handedly stripping the blubber as he balances in sock-feet on their floating corpses in shark-infested waters, but what of it? I could totally do that.

No, I’ve never thrown a harpoon before. But I know what I’m talking about.

by Amanda Lehr, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Gerard DuBois via

[ed. I've been reading Moby Dick again after 50 years and marveling at Melville's writing, something I never fully appreciated back when I was 20 years old. Almost finished now (a couple chapters left) and Ahab has finally found his whale (or vice versa) after 533 of 561 pages. That's right, most of the book isn't about their confrontation, but rather cetology, various ocean phenomena, the practice of whaling, and life in general on a whaling ship. I wonder how many people know that? Yet, it still manages to be engaging and riveting throughout. It's a funny coincidence (for me) that this essay came out now. I know these characters and some of their memorable scenes - like the one mentioned above: Queequeg standing knee deep in water on top of a rolling dead whale, cutting a hole in its thick hide to secure a hook line while hundreds of sharks churn around him in a feeding frenzy (which he sometimes has to kick away). Great stuff.]

The Looting of Science Fiction

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future.

In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across the stars. ‘That’s the goal!’ he concluded. ‘And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!’

It was a remarkable pitch selling the Pentagon a science-fiction vision. Of course, the fit is partial, incomplete. Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation was built on principles of equality and exploration for the sake of knowledge, not profit or military dominance. Musk took the aesthetic – big spaceships, alien encounters, epic adventures – and left its political foundation. You don’t have to be a Trekkie to know that, in Star Trek, capitalism, nationalism and militarism have been left behind. Musk wants the Enterprise, but reimagined for the military-industrial complex.

In 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to ‘Meta’, he took the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992), which imagines the ‘Metaverse’: a virtual reality where people’s avatars navigate digital space.

But Snow Crash is one of the sharpest satirical novels of the past half-century. Stephenson wrote it as a warning: his Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed. The federal government has disintegrated; corporate franchises govern daily life; even pizza delivery has been privatised into a Mafia-run operation. The novel’s protagonist is a pizza deliveryman and part-time hacker whose sword-fighting avatar in the virtual world is the only place where dignity is available to him. Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads.

Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy – where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services – echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, gave expression to this ethos in 2017 when he said: ‘We are the people who make fantasies real.’ It sounds inspiring, but it is important to know which parts of those fantasies they’re choosing, and which parts they’re leaving out. When Musk unveiled Tesla’s Cybertruck in 2019, he had already told investors what to expect: something ‘really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner’. Musk was selling survival gear for a collapsing world, a version of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not. [...]

Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. Those regulatory frameworks Andreessen wants to demolish emerged from hard-won lessons. The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded.

Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power. Tolkien built an entire mythology to make that argument.

In Tolkien’s novels, the palantíri are seeing-stones or crystal balls that allow their users to see across great distances. They sound like neutral tools, like surveillance technology. But they are devices of corruption: Saruman’s palantír connects him to Sauron and leads to his downfall; Denethor’s drives him to madness and suicide. The palantíri don’t just enable seeing – they enable manipulation and control by those who master them.

The US company Palantir Technologies provides analytics and surveillance tools to governments, militaries and ICE, US immigration and customs enforcement. Its name does political work: it transforms invasive tracking into mystical insight, casting algorithmic surveillance as wise foresight rather than systematic intrusion. In their book The Technological Republic (2025), Palantir’s CEO Alexander Karp and his legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska frame Palantir’s government work in martial terms: ‘We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors. To deny the human need for such affiliation has been a mistake.’ They position surveillance tools as fulfilling a fundamental human need for warrior brotherhood. The Tolkien reference provides the aesthetic authority; the distance from Tolkien’s actual moral vision provides the freedom to act without it. Naming a surveillance company after devices that corrupt and betray their users isn’t homage – it is the appropriation of aesthetic while rejecting the moral core.

William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced ‘cyberspace’, a term Gibson coined. Its protagonist, Case, is a hacker whose nervous system was damaged by former employers as punishment. Burned out and banned from cyberspace, he drifts through neon-soaked Chiba City as a ‘console cowboy’ with nowhere left to go. The novel’s cyberspace is owned and controlled by vast corporations; individual hackers are not heroes but tools, hired and discarded by interests they can barely see. Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian: a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion.

In September 1988, the software developer John Walker wrote an Autodesk internal white paper, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Beyond “User Interfaces”’, in which he outlined what he called a ‘cyberpunk initiative’: a proposal to build, within 12 months, a doorway into cyberspace. The project’s motto was blunt: ‘Reality isn’t enough any more.’

By 2025, the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI pump high-energy electronic dance music across their reception area, where easy chairs, scatter cushions and Swiss cheese plants create what the CEO Sam Altman calls a ‘comfortable country house’ rather than a ‘corporate sci-fi castle’. The chrome and grime of cyberpunk – the neon-soaked warning that the corporate capture of digital space would be brutal and dehumanising – has been replaced by Scandinavian furniture and artisanal coffee. Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ has been rebranded as cozy domesticity. The dystopia has not been avoided; it has been made comfortable enough to sign up for.

Gibson himself registered the irony. In an interview with Wired magazine in 2012, he acknowledged that the cyberspace of Neuromancer – all corporate interests and information thieves – bore little resemblance to the early internet he failed to anticipate: the 1990s-2000s moment when a teenager in a bedroom could genuinely outcompete corporations, when the network felt briefly open and democratic. Gibson missed that phase entirely. But he was accidentally right about where things ended up. The corporate platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – that now dominate digital life are far closer to his original vision than to the participatory web that briefly flourished between them. Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

by Ali Rıza Taşkale, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Amazon

Daydreaming Proust

Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.

If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.

Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.

And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.

How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.

It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.

How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.

Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.

In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.

I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust

James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—

One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.

We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.

In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: TLS: "Café in Paris by Night" by Konstantin Korovin, 1936

America Has a Pangram Problem

AI-detection tools are getting better. But they still aren’t good enough.

Basically every recent, high-profile accusation of someone passing off AI-generated writing as their own has started in the same way: with a tool called Pangram. In March, when a horror novel from a major publishing house was pulled just days before its scheduled U.S. release date, it was in part because Pangram, an AI-detection program, had identified the text as AI-generated. Other people have fed text into Pangram to suggest that chatbots have been used to write articles in major newspapers including The New York Times, multiple short stories awarded a prestigious literary prize, and most recently, significant chunks of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical warning about the dangers of AI. The tool is also used by universities to vet student work and scientific associations to scan research papers. As panic builds over AI-generated writing, Pangram is at the foundation.

Just a few years ago, it seemed like it might never be possible to instantly and reliably determine whether a piece of text was written by a bot or a person. In 2023, one detection tool, ZeroGPT, declared the U.S. Constitution to be AI-written; the same year, OpenAI abandoned its AI detector altogether owing to a “low rate of accuracy.” And that was when the quality of ChatGPT’s writing was markedly worse than it is today. But detection tools have gotten much better of late—and Pangram, in particular, has emerged as the gold standard: Paste a chunk of text into Pangram, and the model appraises what portions were “AI Generated,” “AI Assisted,” or “Human Written.”

Yet an AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one. While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.

Pangram says its algorithm is so accurate that it incorrectly identifies text as an AI output only about one in every 10,000 times. “There is a great responsibility, a huge weight” in saying something is AI-generated, Max Spero, Pangram’s CEO, told me. “The only reason we do so is because we’re extremely confident.” Several independent analyses have also confirmed that it is quite good. One paper, from the University of Chicago, found that Pangram had almost no false positives on some 3,000 sample texts of roughly 500 to 1,000 words.

But Pangram’s ability to guarantee something was written by a human is shakier. Spero pointed me to a test showing that Pangram’s false-negative rate, or how frequently the model incorrectly labels text as human, is closer to one-in-70 (although some other assessments say it is more accurate than that).

Part of the problem is that Pangram is in an arms race with the major AI labs, which have an interest in making the writing of ChatGPT and Claude sound as natural and human as possible. And at the same time, Pangram has to deal with AI “humanizers”—programs designed explicitly to disguise AI text as your own. Reddit users rave about a humanizer called Walter Writes AI, which I decided to test out for myself. I had ChatGPT and Claude write brief articles, then pasted them into Walter Writes AI. The program, like other humanizer tools, does some anodyne rewording, swaps one clunky transition clause for another, and introduces grammatical oddities. For instance, ChatGPT’s “The numbers are no longer small enough to ignore” became “The sheer size of these usage figures can no longer be ignored.” When I pasted any output from Walter Writes AI into Pangram, it invariably told me that the twice-baked AI article was human-written. (It’s worth mentioning that The Atlantic forbids using AI-generated text unless labeled as such, and that I do not use AI for research.) [...]

Further complicating matters are the opaque ways in which Pangram and similar tools are designed. The model was trained by feeding it mountains of examples written by a human and by a bot—a book review in an actual magazine, then a review about the same book in the style of the same magazine, but produced by ChatGPT—until it can tell the two apart. This is akin to feeding millions of photos of cats and dogs into an image-recognition algorithm until it learns to spot the differences. Pangram cannot point to much specific evidence or patterns in diction, phrasing, or punctuation to support why it deems something AI or human. (I do not, for instance, understand why “these usage figures” was more human than “the numbers.”) Moreover, while Pangram distinguishes between “lightly” and “moderately AI-assisted,” these broad categories can mean just about anything short of copy-pasting from Claude—using AI for research, coming up with counterarguments, as a thesaurus, for a grammar check. The algorithm’s inner workings are “pretty uninterpretable,” Spero said, and although he wants to make Pangram’s “AI-assisted” label more granular, he is also “still not sure how possible it is.” Amid concerns of overreliance on AI chatbots, we risk simply layering on dependence on yet another black-box algorithm.

Spero told me that Pangram should “never be the ending arbiter” but instead a starting point for a more thorough investigation, and that the company looks into every reported error its model makes. He also noted that all sorts of detection technology we rely on—smoke detectors, TSA scanners—have base error rates too. On some level, in all these cases the biggest problems lie not in the technologies themselves but in what they’re trying to detect. It’s a problem that buildings catch on fire. It’s a problem that AI is seeping haphazardly into every facet of written communication.

by Matteo Wong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty
[ed. This seems like a transient issue to me. If AI is eventually able to write something (or create art) that's undetectable from what a human would produce, who cares? (except for writers and artists, obviously). You don't see this controversy in coding. See also: AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing (Atlantic). Also via DWAtV:

***

Again, we learn not that AI is a good writer, or that humans are bad writers, but that the literary prize judgment processes are worthless.

Jack: That which can be won with undisclosed AI output should be

Nabeel S. Qureshi: *Another* apparently AI-generated story wins a literary prize, this time judged by a panel including the novelist Ruth Ozeki.

Literary prizes need to start including Pangram checks in their process, or else change the rules to make AI writing ok. It’s very simple! [...]

How should we think about ‘witch hunts’ where people identify writing as AI?

Shashank Joshi: One of the worst trends of recent months: pseudoscientific witch-hunts using AI detection tools

The hunts are fully scientific. The detection tools work, at least for now. I have yet to see a case where Pangram said something was AI, and the piece was neither written using AI nor crafted intentionally to fool Pangram. There are some cases of heavy copyediting that trigger Pangram, but if it’s heavy enough to trigger Pangram then I consider that to be on you.

The Kissing Booth

The kissing booth was my daughter’s idea. Here’s how it was supposed to work. Ella and her friend Audrey would set up near the polling place at the Seventh-day Adventist temple. Their Get Out the Vote operation would rely on a repurposed lemonade stand they’d found in Audrey’s basement. Audrey’s mom once ran tech for a theater in Miami, and this lemonade stand was an impressive affair: a wooden counter with a framed opening above a painted wooden sign, looped with bright triangular flags cut out of felt. The sign used to say “Lemonade, 50¢” and below that “Save the Tigers!”

They repainted the sign to say #KissingBooth2024. Of course they didn’t need our help this time. They were fifteen. They traveled around the city on their own and understood precalculus. Their skin was incredible, even when they hadn’t slept enough, and their eyes were clear like marbles. Still, Ella sometimes complained about how she looked. I’d heard that the right response to this was always “You look beautiful.” No details. One weekend she emerged from her room dressed for a party in a lavender slip dress, her dark hair meticulously straightened, tiny dabs of silver glitter at the corner of each eye. I looked at her eleven-year-old brother, Ben, the only other person in the house, and saw him tear up.

“You’re crying!” Ella crowed.

“No I’m not,” Ben said, turning to hide it. I don’t think he knew why he was upset.

Audrey’s mother, Jen, and I had some concerns about the kissing booth from the beginning—namely, predation, germs, and public opinion. Also something else that was harder to put into words. But when we raised the first issue with our daughters, they became defensive.

“You think we can’t decide what to do with our own bodies,” Ella suggested. “You think it’s ‘inappropriate.’”

Audrey looked smug. “That’s what I said they’d say.”

“This is a big city . . .” Jen began.

I tried to help. “It would be different if—”

“If we lived in the suburbs?” Ella glanced at Audrey, incredulous.

Audrey shook her head in disgust. “See?”

Jen and I insisted that we would have the same concerns about a suburban kissing booth. We’d already agreed it never would’ve occurred to us to do something like this at their age, because it was a different political moment—and also a different kissing moment. Most of the teenagers we knew, including our own daughters, didn’t seem to be kissing anyone. They gently mocked the ones who were, as if the sort of dating our generation had done—the pairing up and sneaking out, the baseball metaphors—was a quaint vestige of the past. Maybe they were right. When our daughters first became teenagers, we’d been eager to show them the movies of our adolescence. We’d made popcorn and settled onto the couch, but it hadn’t taken long for them to be appalled or for us to be ashamed. How could we be nostalgic for those days?

That fall, I started running in the park. I could do this at night, while the kids finished their homework. I couldn’t help with homework the way I used to, because everything had changed: long division was now short division, the atom was an electron cloud, and Pluto—which had seemed so far away as to be unassailable—was just a lump of rock and ice in the Kuiper Belt. “Don’t use the algorithm!” Ben warned. “It’s not allowed!” Ella, meanwhile, studied the modern Middle East and didn’t have a single textbook. She had some tasks that had to be done with AI and others for which those programs were expressly forbidden. So I went for a run.

I had time to run during the day, too, especially with the kids spending half of each week at their father’s new apartment. But there was something about the halo around the lights in the park at night, especially if it was drizzling, and the adrenaline I got from needing to stay alert. Also from doing something that was supposedly inadvisable. [...]

If I ran during the day, I listened to a podcast, occasionally one about parenting. There were helpful tips for talking to your teenager: for example, when she said something offensive—such as “All the girls in my grade are bitches” or “You are exactly like Grandma”—I could say, “Let’s try that again,” or “I don’t think that came out the way you meant it.” This hadn’t been supereffective in practice, but I may not have had the right inflection. The psychologist’s voice was low and soothing, and sometimes I found myself letting one episode run into the next, even when the topics weren’t relevant to my children. “My Teen Is into Sports Betting . . . Help!” Or: “My Daughter’s Nude Selfie Got Out. What Do We Do Now?” Each one was like a little pat on the back—nope, not my problem.

Eventually, I did have to listen to the divorce episode, though. The worst things you could do, it turned out, weren’t moving the kids frequently back and forth or running out of money or lying. The worst things were (1) having fights in front of them and (2) criticizing the other parent. I was three-quarters of the way through my run—in the middle of the hill—when Dr. Lisa Damour dropped this bit of wisdom, and I slowed to a walk. Ordinarily, I hated to do that because afterward it felt as if I hadn’t run at all, as if I were a failure.

One saturday that September, I met Drew at the door when he brought Ben home. For a while after we’d separated the previous spring, I would tidy up before he arrived. Drew is an architect and we’d always argued about the apartment, about the extent to which external order was tied to more fundamental issues. The fundamental issue might have been that we disagreed about which issues were fundamental. This time, though, I hadn’t bothered. His eyes moved over the living room, the laundry on the couch, and my empty coffee mug on the table. Mugs. I gave Ben a hug, inhaling his yeasty smell. I used to be relieved when the kids went on short school trips, to the museums in D.C. or camping upstate, but now that they were with their father a few nights a week, I counted the days until they got home. I had to be careful about saying “home”—because Drew said that the apartment he’d had for five months was now equally their home. “OK,” I agreed, “language is important.” That made him roll his eyes.

Ella was at volleyball practice and wasn’t going to be back at my place for a while, so it was a good time to discuss some things. Not a great time because Ben was right there in the kitchen, getting his favorite snack: a slice of Muenster cheese wrapped around a dill pickle.

“Did you know that the bar-headed goose is one of the highest-flying migratory birds?”

“Nope,” I said.

“But the Rüppell’s griffon vulture can fly even higher. One flew seven miles above the earth and hit a plane.”

“Was it OK?”

“No,” Ben said. “It got sucked into the engine. That was in the 1900s.”

“Oh, well, the 1900s,” said Drew. “Ella said to tell you she’d be here by six.”

“How’s she doing?” I didn’t mean to suggest that she wouldn’t be doing well after three days with her father. I was only trying to steel myself for whatever was coming when she got back. Her moods were various and spectacular.

“She called me an effing a-hole,” Drew said. “And so I’m just wondering where she heard that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Who’s been calling you an effing a-hole most recently?”

“Hilarious,” Drew said. “This was after I bought her the tickets, by the way.”

“You bought her the tickets?”

I think he brought up the a-hole thing just to pass along this piece of information, because we had definitely settled on not buying the tickets for Ella, because the cost was excessive and because it felt like a bribe. We had talked about not letting Ella manipulate us into things simply because we felt guilty about our separation.

“She’s so excited,” Ben said from the kitchen. “She hugged Dad, and then she called Rachel.”

Drew looked nervous. “Rachel said that it was the event of the decade, and that if she didn’t go, she would always regret it.”

“Is Rachel paying for the tickets?”

Drew sighed. “Can you leave Rachel out of it?” Then he lowered his voice, as if this were a much larger apartment and the kitchen weren’t steps from the front door. “She’s been acting perfectly toward the kids—do you know how hard that is to find?”

“She’s the needle in the haystack.”

There was a story I made up for the kids when they were little about two children who go into a closet on a rainy day and come out in a magic land. (OK, not totally made-up.) The magic land is ruled by the Balloon Witch. Early on in the story, one of the children finds a golden needle and slips it into the pocket of her overalls. At the end of the story, she uses it to poke the Balloon Witch, who zooms and buzzes around the room until she’s just a piece of rubber on the floor.

“She’s really trying,” Drew said.

“A for effort.”

“Fuck you,” Drew said.

“La, la, la!” Ben yelled from the kitchen. “I can’t hear you!”

Since I hadn’t secretly bought expensive concert tickets or used the f-word in front of our son, I decided to take the opportunity to be the grown-up in the room. “Even though we don’t love being a couple anymore, we do love parenting you together!” I called after Ben, who was running down the hall.

“Don’t use your podcast-lady voice,” he shouted back.

Drew said the separation was my fault. He said he had tried and tried but I didn’t want to work on the marriage. That’s why he’d had the affair—the at-first-only-emotional affair—with the woman he met on the discreet married dating app Ashley Madison. I hadn’t heard of Ashley Madison before I learned about the emotional affair, and at first I thought Drew was having an affair with someone named Ashley Madison. I have to admit I was a tiny bit relieved when I discovered that her name was Rachel and she was a marketing executive in New Jersey.

I told Drew I was glad we’d talked about the affair before it became an actual affair, when it was mostly just texting. But I said that I also thought written conversations could be more intense than in-person ones. He said he didn’t find that to be true, but he wasn’t surprised I thought so, since it had always been obvious to him that I liked books more than people—except for the kids. Even when the books weren’t that good! He said he could stand being third in my affections but not 312th. I wondered at the time how he’d come up with that number, and how many books I actually did prefer to Drew—honestly, three hundred and change wasn’t so many if you were starting with the classics. But I said I knew what he meant, which annoyed him even more. Another of my problems, according to Drew, was that I could always see things from someone else’s point of view and so I failed over and over again to take a side.

by Nell Freudenberger, The Yale Review |  Read more:
Image: Yanmiao / iStock

[ed. See also: When Does a Divorce Begin? (Yale Review).]

Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing. [ed. me too!]

I think he's probably the best science fiction short story writer alive, and possibly the best short story writer, period. [ed. well...]

I've read every one of his stories at least twice, and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate more like seven times. I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

This review covers what he does extremely well, especially unique elements that other science fiction writers have not done as well, or at all.

He Writes “True” Science Fiction

Science fiction critics often divide the genre into:

• "hard" science fiction: aka engineering fiction, stories built on scientifically accurate extrapolations of real physics and technology (think Arthur C. Clarke)

• "soft" science fiction: aka science fantasy, which uses scientific trappings as window dressing for character-driven or sociological stories (think Star Wars).

Ted Chiang has written stories plausibly categorized as either, but more excitingly, many of his stories are neither. He often writes what I think of as true science fiction, where the principles of science themselves are meaningfully different from our world, but still internally consistent.

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

In Seventy-Two Letters, technology springs from Jewish Kabbalah. Golems and divine names drive industrial progress in a steampunk world.

Excitingly, he does this not just with natural sciences but social sciences as well. In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present.

This comes up in his other stories as well:

• In Division By Zero, mathematics itself is broken from within.

• In Hell Is the Absence of God, divine intervention is empirically observable and follows consistent rules

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expect hard science fiction; Chiang is doing something different. Chiang creates different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

Technology is Often Good

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

Now it’s hip and trendy to think of every new technology as the Torment Nexus. Most science fiction today feels like Black Mirror, which ran 7 seasons with exactly one happy ending.

Chiang bucks this trend. Joyce Carol Oates:

It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that [...] ask[s] anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.

In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. Chiang resists those cliches. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, memory augmentation technology allows the narrator to understand his own self-deceptions, and work towards becoming a better person and reconciling with loved ones and even himself. In Liking What You See: A Documentary, a technology that gives users acquired face-blindness allows the main characters to meditate on the nature of human beauty and the shallowness inherent in privileging the beautiful.

Even in situations where the story is overall tragic, like when the characters are faced with existential crisis (in the individual sense), or existential catastrophe (in the world-ending sense), technology isn't the villain but the vehicle for understanding unbearable truths (whether about the world or about ourselves).

Chiang consistently shows us the potential of technology to help us become more human, and have a deeper appreciation for the world and our place in it.

The Lived Experience of Compatibilism

“Compatibilism is a philosophical stance that reconciles free will with determinism. It argues that free will, understood as the ability to act according to one's desires, is compatible with the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by prior events. Essentially, compatibilists believe that even if our choices are predetermined, we can still be considered free and morally responsible if those choices are a result of our own internal states, like desires and intentions.” 

Does that make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me. In practice, compatibilism says something like “free will in the normal, pretheoretic sense of the term, doesn’t exist. Your choices still meaningfully matter nonetheless. You can’t meaningfully get out of the bind philosophically. What you can do, however, is make peace with it.” [...]

In Story of Your Life [SPOILERS], the narrator learns an atemporal alien language and begins experiencing past and future as equally real. It takes her some time to make peace with it, but eventually she fully accepts the truth of determinism. She understands that life is full of tragedy, including that her daughter will die young, but life is full of beauty too. With both regret and awe, she sets forth on the path that she was destined to take.

This is compatibilism from the inside. In both stories, the characters discover they cannot change what will happen, but this knowledge transforms how they experience what must happen: with forgiveness, acceptance, and even joy.

As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse. In Lifecycle of Software Objects, the “we are the parents of our mind-children” metaphor for building sentient AI systems becomes quite literal.

by Linch, The Linchpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Ted Chiang is truly one of the best science fiction writers out there today, and a great essayist too  (I'm also a Neal Stephenson fan). Check out this MetaFilter site: The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang, which includes most of his stories in full (but please buy his books; you'll look smart and discerning to your friends!). A couple favorites that left a lasting impression on me: Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Understand.]

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy