I basically only clicked on this thread to make sure someone had recommended the Grossman translation. Fantastic is almost underselling it.

Yeah, that's pretty much the best way to approach any "novel" that either began as serial fiction, or is structured like serial fiction. Great Expectations, Catch-22, Outlaws of the Marsh, Taiko, etc.

The thing to keep in mind is that this is a format where the presumed reader would only be getting one chapter every month or so. Binging can be... unpleasant.

Oh, man, I definitely need to try this the next time I read some Tolkien. Howard Shore's score is phenomenal.

While you're listening to classical music and reading, please consider also trying to do that with a 80lbs golden retriever sleeping in your lap.

It is the very height of decadent luxury.

Goodreads is a hot mess.

Nah. Amazon has added video game achievements to their Kindle app for iOS (and, presumably, Android, too) and it tracks a fair number of things... but it seems like such a banal thing to me.

I value more how many pages I can get through than how many hours I spend -- and perhaps more importantly, what stays with me after I'm done, as time erodes my memories of the fine details. God knows there are plenty of books out there I've invested far, far too many minutes of my life into that I'd forgotten entirely the subsequent week.

Is it worth reading?

>Naturally, just to confirm, that's the novelist, not the star of Peep Show and other UK comedies.

Well, that's a shame.

Consider also that the goal of AI generation isn't to create great art, or even good art -- just marketable art. And because it's so each and cheap to produce (once the tools are functional, at least) there's no need to try and get 1 book to sell 1,000 copies, for example, when it's much easier to sell 1,000 books once.

The only real threshold is that it has to look good enough to make that one sale.

Things are definitely gonna be tough in terms of discoverability for new authors (especially indies) for a while, but... that's already the case. There's demand for good art, though, is always going to exist, and is always going to be best produced by human hands.

Also, a quick (and brief) follow up: the games industry has spent the last half-century or so investing a ton of time, money and effort into the "golden goose" of procedurally-generated environments and narratives. If they didn't have to hire artists and designers and writers, games would not just be much cheaper to develop, but easier, too.

And in every case, across the board, procedurally-generated content has proved inferior to hand-crafted content.

Even when dealing with very few variables -- a two-dimensional level of a forest or a dungeon or whatever, where the entire thing is built out of tiles in a grid pattern -- these AI-created spaces have a distinctly artificial quality, are almost universally inferior to deliberately-crafted spaces, and are often seriously compromised (EG impassable terrain, poor player guidance, etc.).

These spaces are conceptually very simple, and only really need to satisfy two needs: to be realistic approximations of the intended environment, and the be interesting spaces for players to navigate.

Literature, meanwhile, is exponentially more complex and needs to serve many, many more goals.

And there's a helluva lot more money in the video games industry than in the printing industry -- around 80 billion USD to around 350 billion USD. If the one industry cannot use AI to accomplish a far simpler goal with much more time and much more money, what are the odds the other will be able to surpass them far less time with far less money?

So you can see, I think, why I am so deeply skeptical of this whole thing, and dismiss it as overblown marketing hype (in which must of the media is, as always, deeply complicit).

And now my meds are starting to wear off, which means I'm either due for a bad time that may precipitate more meds, or a crash. In either case, time to log off for a bit.

I think that first point is certainly the most likely outcome. The market for low-effort fanfiction is gonna collapse fairly quickly, I think. But that's generally not something many folks've managed to build a career out of.

Also consider that there's already more fiction out there in the world than any human being could possibly read even in a dozen lifetimes. We don't need any more. So why don't we stop? Why is it, instead, that exponentially more fiction is being written today than at any other point in human history?

It's just what we do. The market may shift and change (as it ever does) but the practice? It's bedrock. Humans've been telling stories since the invention of speech (EDIT: which, honestly, probably predates the evolution of homo sapiens), we're not gonna suddenly want to stop telling them or hearing them any time soon.

My thoughts may not be terribly useful.

I have two.

First, why do we write? Is it to make money? God knows there are easier ways. Is it for other people? They'd probably appreciate something less indirect. Or is it for ourselves? This may be a bit unduly biased by my personal experiences -- I've got selective mutism, and found in writing a means to communicate with other people that I was otherwise denied in life -- but I think it ultimately holds true for all forms of art. Art is, I think, a fundamentally selfish endeavor.

Imagine the hubris in thinking, "I want to create something with no material value." It's vanity at its most audacious.

And then putting in the work to actually make it. And the frightful temerity to then release this thing that you've created out into the world, for other people to see and judge.

We create first for ourselves, and ultimately are beholden to no one but ourselves. This can be terrifying and lonely, but also liberating: it means nothing can threaten us but ourselves. No one can take away our capacity to create art but ourselves.

Second, this is hardly the first time existential fears about the future of media consumption have come up. Fiction has been around for millennia, books for centuries. They've survived the radio, the movie, the television, the video game and the smartphone -- and each time some shiny new medium has been invented, people sounded the alarm about the impending death of the book.

Yet we still write, and we still read.

More than writing as a whole no longer being a sustainable industry, I think the average writer has far more to fear from trends and shifts in audience expectations. Westerns used to be a very popular and profitable genre, for example: now, if you want to write westerns, you're unlikely to find much of an audience. What's popular and marketable is constantly shifting, and few if any writers are going to have a broad enough skillset to weather such shifts undamaged.

Books ain't ever gonna go away -- but the kinds of books people are interested in reading just might.

....

Okay, I lied. I've actually got a third thought.

Do you remember last year, and the handful of years before that, when so many media outlets were buzzing about the "incredible potential" of the blockchain, and the futures promised by cryptocurrencies and NFTs? (If you don't, good God do I envy you.) Ya' ever wonder why all of that media coverage just quietly stopped? Or why just as those stories were being phased out, they started being replaced by coverage of AI art generation?

It's. All. Marketing.

All of it. AI generation is: unethical, yes; possibly illegal, true; but more importantly it's not very good. And the language being used to discuss it is carefully constructed to create a false impression of what it can and cannot due. Once more: it's all marketing. Hype. Building up a product by overpromoting it's strengths while simultaneously obfuscating its weaknesses.

We call it "artificial intelligence," but it's not really an AI. At least not by the conventional, pop-cultural understanding. We call it, "generation," but it's not actually creating anything new -- just synthesizing new material. This is why AI generation requires the tools be "trained" by consuming vast amounts of existing art -- the more media they have to synthesize, the more varied their output.

An AI can generate a composite image of a woman sitting a table, but has no conception of what a woman is, or what a table is. It can just reference various other images that have women in them, and tables in them, and mash them together. AI-generated writing functions the same way: it takes existing material whose tags fit the prompts provided and combines it.

Already we've seen many examples of artists finding AI-generated work that was made using their original material (taken without permission) as a base. The illusion of the AI creation being something genuinely new is an illusion easily shattered -- that it can persist is largely due to just how much media exists, and how unfamiliar most people will be with the majority of it.

Don't get me wrong, AI writing is going to be a nightmare for the next few years as techbros try to leverage it into making them a lot of money. And that's gonna hurt a lot of writers -- especially self-published writers who don't have any sort of support or protection or promotion from a publisher. Getting your work to stand out among a flood of cheaply-produced AI crap is going to be a very unique breed of hell.

Because here's the thing: the techbro pulling this shit doesn't need to sell a lot of copies of one book to make money, they just need to sell a few copies of many different books -- books that cost them very little to produce. So expect the eBook market to become, somehow, even worse than it already is.

But at the end of the day, an AI can't create anything new. It can only create material that is very similar to stuff that already exists. And as writers, should the goal not be to push boundaries? To be bold and inventive and surprising? To strive to create something more than the generic or mediocre? To be so selfish as to invest themselves into a text, and then thrust that text into the world? There will always be people willing to do that, and there will always be -- eager and appreciative and sometimes weirdly angry -- an audience waiting.

.....

And, hey, what if I'm wrong? What if everything I've said is bullshit? Look, I'm having a bad night. I'm on painkillers. My present state of mind is not exactly what one might call crystal clear, so I very well could be. What then?

In that case, consider this: you're gonna die.

I'm gonna die, too.

We're all gonna die.

Sucks, right?

So how do you want to live? Do you want to spend your time engaged in an activity you enjoy, that you find rewarding? Or do you want to run away, out of the fear that it might not be so in perpetuity?

How much do you want to let your anxiety over what might be govern your actions and beliefs over what is?

Oh, sorry. I misspoke. When I said, "we're all gonna die," what I meant to say was that the entire human race will eventually, inevitably, go extinct. This Earth we live on, too, will perish. The sun will expand to many times its current size, boiling the very skies, and ultimately collapse in on itself, its fury spent, having erased every last trace of our collective existence. Only a lonely ball of naked rock will remain. It, too, will eventually perish.

And there will be no one around to even suggest the possibility that we might have been.

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing. One day someone will write a book, and it will be the last book ever written. Someday someone will read a book, and it will be the last book ever written. This will happen -- it cannot not happen. Maybe we'll live to see it, maybe we won't.

What's the worst case scenario? That what brings you fulfillment and meaning and helps you persist today might not offer the same tomorrow? Then enjoy what you can today, and seek out something else tomorrow. Let go of the expectation that anything should exist in perpetuity, and do what you can, when you can. What meaning and substance our lives have is ours alone to determine.

He never really clicked for me, but I do kind of like his approach to writing. Essentially I think there are really only two approaches you can take when writing something (anything, really): are you writing for yourself, or for your audience? The latter approach is generally going to be more successful, but the former is, I think, often more interesting. And I think Saunders embraces the former category.

IIRC Saunders began as a technical writer, so he presumably has both the skill and the practice to write very simply and clearly. So when he's not being clear, that's a deliberate choice, and it's worth considering why he might make that decision. Personally, I prefer that kind of ambiguity in short fiction, because it gives the text a kind of... longevity and complexity that generally wouldn't otherwise be possible with short-form fiction.

Hopefully that makes sense. I'm having one of my bad days, and my pain medication can make me a bit... rambly and sometimes somewhat, slightly, incoherent.