First of all, the link to the video I embedded yesterday from a Facebook Group called Oddly Human, about human evolution and psychopathy, now leads only to a post on the group’s page, not a video, which I now can’t find. Hmm.
Meanwhile, today, I came across five similar groups, that like Oddly Human, post several times a day video essays about various intellectual topics. Most of them indicate AI content; one or two indicate a specific city location, and even a contact phone number.
Primitive Mind
Transcendental Space
The Untold
The Shadow Mind
Theory of Everything
I don’t spend lots of time on Facebook, actually. I check it several times a day, for three or four minutes at a time. Of course, because I “followed” Oddly Human yesterday means that Fb is showing me more similar posts.
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Coincidentally, and reflecting my own reaction, Jesse Bering posts on Fb today about a similar video. It’s on YouTube; I’m copying the embed code.
He says: “AI or not, my compliments to whoever put this together. It’s a very watchable and humane handling of some very slippery issues.”
That was my reaction to the Oddly Human post.
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Second of all. I should say something about the novel that won the Booker Prize in Britain this past week. It was The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison, a writer who’s written science fiction and fantasy novels since the early 1970s. He’s 81 now.
I read it, over a week or so, about a month ago, inspired by the Booker longlist and shortlist results.
It’s a strange, surrealistic novel, set in the aftermath of an invasion by aliens called the iGhetti, focusing on a man named Phillip Tennant who lives along the mostly deserted Kent coastline in southeast UK where alien artefacts wash up every day. He searches among them for something he can sell. The background is ambiguous and murky. Civilization seems to have collapsed; Europe seems to have gone missing. Tennant finds an ‘artefact,’ which somehow gradually transforms into a human-like entity. And it gets weirder from there.
There is a long tradition in science fiction of attempting to describe inscrutable aliens, or inscrutable states of reality. That reality has changed is what Harrison calls “the end of everything.” This is a fine addition to that tradition.
That it won the Booker Prize suggests that literary critics, who have for decades dismissed science fiction (and fantasy) from serious literary consideration, have suddenly discovered something they had not realized existed. Via File 770:
The Guardian, yesterday: Does M John Harrison’s Booker win mean science fiction is finally accepted by a ‘snobby’ literary establishment?, subtitled “Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeff VanderMeer, Olivia Laing and other writers weigh in on the publishing world’s genre wars”
As M John Harrison was announced as the Booker prize winner on Monday evening, the 81-year-old looked gobsmacked. Decades into his career, and long overlooked by the mainstream literary establishment, he had just won a prize that has never before rewarded a writer known for science fiction, with a decidedly fantastical book.
His fans, many leading authors among them, are thrilled. “For decades it was a standard – and correct – nerd whine to point out that sentence for sentence, book for book, Harrison was one of the greatest writers out there, full stop, but that ‘mainstream’ prizes never reflected that,” says China Miéville, who last week won the Goldsmiths prize with his 1,200-page speculative novel The Rouse. Back in 2002, Miéville wrote that Harrison not having won a Booker by that point proved “the bankruptcy and back-slapping generic snobbery of the literary establishment”. Now, he says: “I am so delighted, for Harrison, and for fiction.”
There is no reason to think that writers of science fiction or fantasy are any less skilled than writers of mainstream novels. Except that it was obviously true decades ago when science fiction emerged in cheap ‘pulp’ magazines. And was retained as literary critics and standard-bearers of ‘literature’ had very specific ideas about what kinds of stories constituted ‘literature.’ As with everything, these standards change.
I may expand this section into a separate post, with further comments about the novel, and about the reactions to it. And a cover image.
