Well.
If you're engaged with the world of SFF at all and haven't been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you already know that the issue du jour is AI-generated stories.
Clarkesworld
and
Grimdark Magazine
closed to submissions after being flooded with AI spam, and even more worryingly, Mark of Wyldblood Press
.
You can exhale, I'm not here to offer another hot take on AI. No doubt you've already heard about the many ways it's going to make life harder for editors and authors, especially those just starting out. It sucks and I don't have any suggestions.
But it does seem symptomatic of a wider malaise, which is probably not new, just more visible because we're all horribly online these days. Every time I log onto social media, I see writers worrying that they're not productive enough, that they aren't putting out a book every year or even every few months, so they'll be forgotten. I worry about it myself. It's been over a year since
was published, and I don't have a publisher for the next book yet -- will anyone remember I exist?
And when they do have a book coming out, they're encouraged to market it with lists of tropes like recipe ingredients: Enemies to lovers! Only one bed! Found family! It's a kind of marketing that tells you nothing about the themes, or the characters, or the atmosphere, as if the tropes are Lego bricks that can be slotted in anywhere. It all leads toward thinking of art as product or 'content', just there to fill space and time, and it makes me a little sad. Not because I think we should all be aspiring to win the Booker but as someone who tries to put thought and care and craft into what I do, and who finds the process of creating it meaningful.
I'm not trying to suggest that creative work is a uniquely human activity (for one thing, too many animals seem to have some kind of aesthetic sense for that to be true), but there's something about it that feels essential, to me. Ideas are cheap, but turning one into a piece of fiction -- working out the characters and the dark corners and the idiosyncracies and the voice -- gives a satisfaction that I don't think can be replicated by feeding a prompt into ChatGPT, and that I hope comes through to the reader. The flood of AI stories seems like another way to deny that meaning and expression to writers, especially new and marginalised ones, by ensuring they just can't afford to spend the time, and by devaluing the work they do as just another rote task that can be turned over to an automated system.
I don't have solutions. It just makes me a little sad.
But, on a slightly related note, I thought I'd share a blog post I wrote a few months back. It was originally intended to accompany my story, "A Piece of String", about a girl looking for a guitar string in a post-apocalyptic world, but didn't end up being used. The story is about art as a necessity, almost as vital as food and air, and so it feels obliquely appropriate to this present moment. You can read it in the current issue of
, if you're so inclined.
Songs for the End of the World
It’s a cliché to say that music saved your life–embarrassingly adolescent, perhaps–but I think it’s a cliché for good reason. Adolescence is the time when most of us find the songs and artists we’ll remember as the soundtracks to our lives decades later, when seeing them in concert feels like the most thrilling thing in the world, and a rubbish second album is an earth-shattering disappointment. It’s also the time when the ordinary heartbreaks of life feel most like the end of the world–and, for some, the time when symptoms of neurodivergence or mental illness start to make life truly difficult.No wonder, then, that hearing those feelings echoed in music can feel like salvation. For me, it was the millenarian angst of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” drifting from a radio tuned to the Evening Session; the powerhouse opening snarl of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin”; the relentless, nihilistic assault of the Manics’ The Holy Bible. Maybe for you it was hip-hop, or metal, or the Welsh-language indie scene.The older I get, the more sceptical I become of claims that the job of art is to foster empathy or give us hope (too often, such assertions end in demands for didacticism or uplift that disproportionately hit marginalised creators making challenging work), but nonetheless, I think we need it. There are parts of us that demand expression and witnessing, even if that expression sometimes just sounds like inchoate screaming, and art is how we do it. On your worst day, a song or a story that says, “Yes, it’s awful, and I see it too” can be a lifeline. That’s one reason it’s such a tragedy successive Tory governments in Westminster have treated the arts as a hobby for rich kids and nothing more.“A Piece of String” is a story about art as necessity and expression, even in the direst of circumstances. Songs as connection and catharsis.Here are a few of my favourites.Hole - “Violet”Courtney Love’s lyrics often feel screamed from the bottom of the world, from the deepest pits of love and despair. Contrasted with the lush guitar sound and oddly beautiful images of amethyst skies and stars like “little fish”, the chorus’s demand that an absent loved one (or perhaps the world) “take everything, I dare you to” feels like a scream in the face of a personal apocalypse.Skunk Anansie - “You Saved Me”It’s always this one that sticks with me, over and above any of their nineties classics. There’s Skin’s voice and that gorgeous, swooping melody, of course, but more than that, it’s the way this song celebrates connection, support, and open doors, without which none of us can survive.Dream Wife - “F. U. U.”A football-terrace chant reimagined by a girl gang from an apocalyptic future, this one always closes out their live shows in riotous fashion, and will make you feel, however briefly, like Tank Girl and Molly Millions rolled into one. Plus the live version contains a sly Spice Girls nod that never fails to make me smile.Bat For Lashes - “Trophy”Bat For Lashes’ first album, Fur and Gold, remains, dare I say it, a solid gold classic nearly two decades on, and “Trophy” is its standout track. Beneath the sexy, pulsing beat and Natasha Khan’s deceptively gentle vocals, there’s quiet menace and a brooding sense of something irretrievably lost.Manic Street Preachers - “Faster”A hundred-mile-an-hour death ride through the ills of the world with a killer riff, “Faster” blasted its way into my personal Number One slot when I first heard it aged fourteen and never left. But for all the nihilism, what keeps me coming back to it is that one defiant line, “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing,” a fierce grasp for meaning from the jaws of its absence.
What I've been reading:
I'm on a mission to read a few of the SFF classics that have passed me by this year, and my favourite book this month was Octavia E. Butler's
Kindred
, about a Black woman in the 1970s who keeps getting sucked back through time to the antebellum South. It's an immensely humane and compassionate novel, and also truly terrifying. If you've also missed out on this one, read it.
I don't have a ton of writing updates this month. I finished a draft of my current novel project and sent it off to my agent, and wrote a little ghost story which will hopefully be going to my beta-readers this week, but there's no publication news. Work is chugging along on the
Murderbirds!
and
Hidden Villains: Arise
anthologies, which are due out over the next couple of months, and I received a gorgeous contributor copy of
He Bears the Midnight Crown
, which should, all going well, also be available to buy in March.
'Til then, take care.
J