Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for “low” or “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.

Nowadays we associate the word “prodigy” with precocious children, but in centuries past the word was used to describe anything monstrous. Victor Stott clearly qualifies as a prodigy in the modern sense, but he qualifies in the older sense too: Not only does he frighten the ignorant and superstitious, he induces a profound terror in the educated and intellectual. Seen in this light, the first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.

We are standing on a precipice.

At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand. We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs—our records of the human experience—are “written” by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love.

AI may give the appearance of understanding our humanity, but the truth is, only a human being can speak to and understand another human being. Every time a prompt is entered into AI, the language that bot uses to respond was created in part through the synthesis of art that we, the undersigned, have spent our careers crafting. Taken without our consent, without payment, without even the courtesy of acknowledgment.

In our writing, we drew on our lives: the losses of our parents, the births of our children, every love affair we’ve lived or imagined. Stories of human heroism and human depravity. These stories were stolen from us and used to train machines that, if short-sighted capitalistic greed wins, could soon be generating the books that fill our bookstores. Is this the end goal—to fully remove us from the equation so that those at the very top of the capitalist structure can profit even further off our labor than they already do? Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.

The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point. AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits—but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them.

Like fashion trends, fads in book covers come and go. One year, the backs of women’s heads might be all the rage; the next, soft focus photography. And who can forget the exploding flower craze? Or the proliferation of flames on jackets, from thrillers to science fiction to self-help?

But the look that’s commanding today’s runways — a.k.a. bookshelves — is not so incendiary. It tends to lay blaringly bright type in a sans-serif font atop a painting, usually a few centuries old but not always. Facial expressions are baleful or dyspeptic; an aggressive burst of spray paint can change the tone entirely.

These covers are the new signifiers of stylish literary fiction, telegraphing gravitas, wit and cool. They make a bid for a certain kind of reader — more city than suburb, more pét-nat than chardonnay. They wouldn’t be caught dead alongside a volume decked out in pop art or, god forbid, metallic lettering.

Thomas Haggerty, a senior account manager at Bridgeman Images, which licenses paintings for commercial projects, credits the trend to “the power of juxtaposition.” Gregg Kulick, executive art director at Hachette Book Group, agrees: “Poppy type” reads as fun, he says, while the paintings “hint at the academic.”

So how did this ripped-from-the galleries craze get off the ground? After all, paintings have graced the covers of novels since “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” but it appears that “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2019) might be the trailblazer for this century’s spate.

Here’s the story behind that one, plus eight descendants out — or soon to be — this year.

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. … Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

ISBN 9780374610326 (don't buy from Amazon or its subsidiaries)

When UN spokesperson Darren Melvik posts a provocative image in a private Facebook group, he never imagines the storm it will unleash. What begins as an act of personal frustration soon spirals into a global scandal, implicating powerful religious and political leaders in a conspiracy to manipulate international institutions. As Darren navigates the labyrinth of digital surveillance and institutional cover-ups, he is drawn into a web of intrigue linking his own heritage to a Cold War-era research program designed to control minds through religious symbolism.

In a story blending real-world diplomacy with psychological conspiracy, The 13th Apostle and the UN exposes the hidden levers of power and the fragile line between personal conviction and global consequence.

Victor Modström, drawing from over a decade within international institutions, crafts a narrative that delves deep into the complexities of bureaucracy, identity, and the human cost of institutional decisions. This debut novel not only unveils the shadows lurking within the UN but also questions the nature of truth and the price of standing by one's principles.

I just finished Advocate, book 3 of Daniel M. Ford's The Warden series. I've been really enjoying this world. The first two books ended on cliffhangers, and the year wait between entries was killing me. Book 3 ended with a nice wrap up of one arc and a setup for another, both building up the bones of a larger story that's been looming ominously.

The problem is, it looks like Tor has dropped the series. The Warden and Necrobane were available in hardcover, but Advocate only got a TPB release. I can't find anything concrete about book 4, and according to a friend of a friend (and taken with the appropriate grain of salt) sales weren't good enough on the first book (?!?) to warrant re-upping the series.

I'm bummed. I found out about Ford's first series, Paladin, through word of mouth. I thought it was okay - a little tropey in places, but once he found his pace it was entertaining enough. Then he did some detective stuff that I had no interest in, but when I heard that he was doing another fantasy series, and that it got picked up by Tor, my interest was piqued. The result so far has been a marked improvement from Paladin, and one of the few things to poke through my deep depression these past few years. And now it's all in limbo.

Maybe I'm overreacting. I'm not going to pretend the know the machinations of the publishing world, and maybe someone else is going to pick up the series. It's just frustrating to find something nice and get it yanked away.

Anyway, rant over. I enjoyed my time with this series regardless of its future. If anyone else has read it (or has heard any news about continuation), I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In the year in which the groundbreaking activist would have turned 100, a new book looks at the enduring impact of his words and how they resonate today

The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a new book about the great Black leader who was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, 100 years ago; who in the 1950s converted to Islam and dropped his “slave name”; who rose to fame as the militant voice of the civil rights era; and who was assassinated in New York in 1965, aged just 39.

The book is not a biography. As the author, Mark Whitaker, puts it, his book tells “the story of the story of Malcolm, the story that really made him the figure he is today, even more so than what he accomplished while he was living.

I ran into this from a Reddit comment on r/Futurology absent the context that it was fiction. This eventually becomes apparent, but the past couple of hours have been a wild ride.

This is chapter one, of which there are eight. It is well-crafted sci-fi and ultimately (as tends to be the case in the genre, as there's not much drama to everything going well) lands somewhere quite optimistic.

What the human condition could be if we stopped all the bullshit, profit motive and oligarchy.

Providing an excerpt from longform fiction is somewhat pointless, but the writing is sharp, and the story flows well.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a flurry of “takes” on what people think we should do about libraries (one wildly bad idea was that they should be replaced with bookstores so people could pay 30 bucks per hardcover instead of paying their goddamn taxes and getting use of a community space). The response to these garbage articles was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping libraries open! Hell yeah. Let me tell you, though, there’s a lot more you can do for your local branch aside from posting a well-intentioned tweet. The thing about libraries is . . . we need you to use them. All the time. Get your ass to the library. This week I’ve compiled a handy lists of dos and don’ts so you can continue to support your libraries and librarians and library staff. I’m generous that way; you’re welcome.

“I recall Midwestern summer nights, standing on my grandparents’ hushed lawn,” Ray Bradbury told me in 2010, “and looking up at the sky at the confetti field of stars. There were millions of suns out there, and millions of planets rotating around those suns. And I knew there was life out there, in the great vastness. We are just too far apart, separated by too great a distance to reach one another.”

For the young Bradbury, who would grow up to make that great vastness feel, to many, as almost as tangible as home, there was one celestial body more captivating than any other: Mars.

Mars: The fourth planet from our sun, some 140 million miles from us on average. The only planet in our solar system, other than our own, deemed by scientists and stargazers over the centuries to be—possibly, at one time—hospitable to life.

The planet has been part of our collective imagination for centuries, from the tales of ancient mythology, to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars. Ray Bradbury may have been yet another in a long line of artists dreaming about Mars, but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,” with his 1950 story cycle The Martian Chronicles.

While Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 is often cited as his crowning achievement, it was The Martian Chronicles—arguably a superior work—that put his name on the literary map. The Martian Chronicles was published by Doubleday 75 years ago, on May 4th, 1950. Until that point, science fiction had been mostly dismissed by the firmament as “kids’ stuff,” littered as it was with pulpy tropes such as ray guns, little green men, and scantily clad damsels in distress. But The Martian Chronicles subverted all that, addressing a range of vital, vexing, timeless societal themes in the midst of McCarthy era America: nuclear war, genocide, environmental destruction, the rise of technology, corporatization, censorship, and racism.

Lamentably, these themes still tower over us in the Trumpian zeitgeist all these years later, but their continuing relevance only underscores the point: The Martian Chronicles is a serious book about serious human themes. It is science fiction as a reflection of modernity. The writing is exquisite, showcasing Bradbury at the dizzying height of his poetic prowess, lyrical, rich in metaphor, pastoral, with stunning passages of seemingly effortless prose, eschewing the occasionally purple passages of certain other works, like Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the more dialogue driven polemics of Fahrenheit 451. It hits the sweet spot between poetic exposition and complete narrative originality. With its publication, Ray Bradbury, not quite 30 years old, had pulled off a tour de force magique—he had created literary science fiction, and the intelligentsia quickly took notice.

I was thinking about this today. Where there stories in the past where the magic world and the normal world separate. The only Olden times stories i know of are myths and religious stories and i don't think those count since people already believed in the magic world, so no reason to say the everyday people where not aware of the magical world(except in cases like religion). I remember watching an OSP video(Trope Talk: Save The World). She talks about how The concept of the world or even a world being a modern day thing. People use to live in secluded areas from one another and so had no knowledge of a world, Most stories back than involved saving villages or towns or even islands. In Modern Marvel, all kinds of Magical worlds exist and normal people know of them and still go on about there day(Granted Most of those magical world revealed themselves to in modern time as not fuck up history). That's the only case of i know where both the magical world and the normal world exist side by side with everyday people knowing about them.What are your thoughts?

so! like the title says, what is your favorite genre for reading, and maybe what is a genre that you aren't so crazy about?

for me, I love fantasy, especially urban fantasy. it's tricky for me to find stuff I hit it off with all the way for that unfortunately, because I'm usually not interested in the romantic aspect being pushed so hard. but I love how authors will approach supernatural species and magic systems. plus, of course, I like to see character development.

I have been looking in YA because it's been a long time since I've seriously tried to read (since I was in high school, actually) and I'm really excited about trying a book called Legendborn. it looks amazing, and I've been told the magic system is excellent. admittedly, I haven't had the best luck with adult fiction just because, again, I don't enjoy most of the ways romance is written.

I don't really vibe with things like historical books, just because I don't consider myself great at history. I do enjoy learning things, but the ones that don't explain much leave me feeling lost. I also have that kind of issue with hard sci-fi, because even with explanations, that one can leave me feeling like I'm not understanding.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/323887

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Keep it going, guys.

Meta exposé tops bestseller chart despite company’s attempt to ban its promotion Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her seven years as a Facebook executive is number one on the New York Times bestseller list and has flown off the shelves in the UK

An exposé by a former employee of Meta has become a bestseller despite the social media company banning the author from promoting the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, topped the New York Times bestseller chart and will be fourth on the Sunday Times nonfiction hardback chart this weekend.

The book “sold a staggering 1,000 hardbacks a day in the first three days on sale in the UK, despite Meta’s legal tactics to silence the book’s author”, said Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan. “This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book.”

archive.is link

On May 10, 1996, 43 climbers attempted to reach the summit of Mount Everest. By the following day, five of them were dead. The tragedy—occurring at a time when the commercial guiding business was ramping up on the mountain and the dream of summiting Everest seemed suddenly available to anyone able to afford the $68,000 price tag—electrified the public. The most celebrated account of the disaster came from journalist Jon Krakauer, first as a barn-burning feature in Outside magazine, which had commissioned him to cover the climb as a participant, and later as the bestselling book Into Thin Air.

People have been arguing about the catastrophe ever since, from the 1997 book The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian-Kazakhstani guide who felt he’d been unfairly portrayed in Into Thin Air, to a present-day YouTube campaign against Krakauer. The latter, conducted by a lawyer in Irvine, California, named Michael Tracy, was purportedly triggered by a rash of recent YouTube videos from various creators, all excoriating another climber who was on the mountain that day, Sandy Hill Pittman. One of the most viewed of these—titled “Ungrateful Socialite Endangers Climbers on Deadly Mount Everest Excursion” and narrated by a creepily soft-voiced therapist who makes videos about famous true crimes and seems to have a sideline in “analyzing” the women climbers he blames for various mountaineering disasters—gives a pretty good sense of the tenor of these debates. For his part, Krakauer has long shown himself ready to return fire to his critics.

Are these gloomy forecasts about the modern information ecosystem just reiterations of old fears? Plato lamented that writing would erode our minds; the printing press was denounced as a diabolical device. Newspapers were accused of peddling filth and debasing public morality; television was going to rot our minds.

But Carr makes a persuasive case that this time is different. With older media, the friction of the interface provided some space for reflection and hierarchizing significance. What was on the front pages or what led the news bulletins was what we heeded most. Music had to be sought out and didn’t come with an infinite stream of more. Digitization has become a “universal solvent” for all information, fed to the same device on the same platform with a convenience and ease that becomes a curse. We have evolved to seek, says Carr, but with the internet, there is no natural curb to that desire, and never any sense of satiation. Reality can’t compete with the internet’s steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards. The ease of the user interface, congenial even to babies, creates no opportunity for what writer Antón Barba-Kay calls “disciplined acculturation.”

< Not only are these technologies designed to leverage our foibles, but we are also changed by them, as Carr points out: “We adapt to technology’s contours as we adapt to the land’s and the climate’s.” As a result, by designing technology, we redesign ourselves. “In engineering what we pay attention to, [social media] engineers […] how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world,” Carr writes. We become dislocated, abstracted: the self must itself be curated in memeable form. “Looking at screens made me think in screens,” writes poet Annelyse Gelman. “Looking at pixels made me think in pixels.”

The temptation to blame every current sociopolitical failing on communications technologies should be resisted, though, and just occasionally Carr’s argument goes beyond the evidence. He accepts the contested claim that false stories spread faster than true ones and cites social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s disputed (if plausible) argument that social media can be identified as a cause and not just a correlate of depression and anxiety in young people. Carr’s claim that “open-ended, contemplative ways of thinking—the philosophical, the ruminative, the introspective—have been marginalized” warrants further interrogation. And when he quotes media scholar Ian Bogost as saying that social media offer only a “sociopathic rendition of human sociality,” one has to ask: Is that really all it does? Do we not initiate and cultivate friendships this way? Didn’t communication technologies help relieve the isolation of pandemic lockdown? Additionally, Superbloom is heavily predicated on the American experience. For many people globally, hyperreality offers no escape from hardship, drudgery, peril, and war.

All the same, the case Carr makes is compelling. Is there an antidote? He does not believe we can simply reshape and constrain the technologies. It is too late for that—it would be like putting a path across a park that no one wants to follow. That’s not to say that we can’t have better laws and regulations, checks and balances. One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading. An option Carr doesn’t mention is to require companies to perform safety studies on their products, as we demand of pharmaceutical companies. Such measures have already been proposed for AI.

Hi!

Looking for a book that I know very little about. I heard from a Dan Carlin podcast a while ago about some stories compiled into a book. It was about people's memoirs of pre-WWII Germany, like 1920s and 30s, and specifically them trying to and sometime successfully leaving Germany for various other places.

Sorry, I have very few details about it. Any chance someone knows what it is?

Thanks!

PASADENA, Calif. — Usually, Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, California, is filled with books. The walls are lined with titles on dark brown shelves, and customers can buy candles and other small goods, too. But for the past two weeks, the Black-owned bookshop has been packed wall-to-wall with supplies like bottles of water, hygiene products, clothes and food that are given away for free to locals impacted by the ongoing wildfire in the area.

“The focus has always been serving the community and that means different things at different times. Right now it means something other than books,” Kiki Williams, manager of the bookstore, said.

The history of book bans in the US goes back to 1637 but has recently increased dramatically, nearly 200% during the 2023-24 school year. This rise is driven by conservative policies claiming many books have themes that go “against” American history. But are these books really problematic? The World’s Lex Weaver shares her experience attending a banned-book symposium hosted by Morgan State University in Havana, Cuba, where authors and historians discussed their worries about the future of education.