Category: Book

Temporal Babel: A Novelette

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Cover Art, Dall-E, Generative AI, Ridley Park, Short Story, Software, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

I just completed a second draft of a novelette I’ve been working on. I had ChatGPT (Dall-E) render a quick sample cover.

A young woman stumbles across an unconscious man on a remote highway outside Anika, New Mexico. He’s naked, tattooed, breathing — and utterly incomprehensible. Medical professionals, police, and a determined psychiatrist try to parse his language, but his words follow rules that don’t exist and reference a world no one knows. As they struggle to decode him, they’re forced to reckon with the limits of their own assumptions, both linguistic and moral.

Temporal Babel explores the failure of language, the fragility of identity, and the quiet panic that sets in when comprehension fails.

The story takes place in New Mexico, and I wanted a minimalist visual style to match the prose. I believe that a beige desert set against a blue sky is perfect. The deserted highway with a single cactus speaks volumes. The footprints in the desert are also evocative. I love the simplicity of the palette.

Though it revered the front and back cover art, it generally followed my instructions. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in a year. All of the words are spelt correctly. I could Photoshop this into shape with little effort.

I only plan to release this as an ePUB because I am compiling a triptych. Currently, the body copy stands at 105 pages, so with title pages and the rest, it should reach 112 pages, which is perfect for seven 16-page signatures.

Accelerando and Other Non-Fantastical Utopianism

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Generative AI, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been absent in the realm of fiction and this blog for a while, and I’ve got many other things distracting me, but I wanted to post something somewhat relevant. I prompted ChatGPT for possible writing ideas related to the rise of artificial intelligence and the interaction with humanity minus the usual tropes. I share the response.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.

Ah, so you’re after something in the vein of Accelerando—where AI doesn’t turn the world into some saccharine utopia but instead naturally supersedes humanity through sheer momentum, without falling into the Skynet or AI God-King clichés. You want the cold, indifferent inevitability of intelligence evolution, rather than some paradise-like AI nanny-state. Got it.

Here are some that fit your criteria:

1. “Blindsight” (2006) & “Echopraxia” (2014) by Peter Watts

  • Blindsight is a first-contact novel, but its underlying theme is the obsolescence of human consciousness. The protagonist interacts with post-human beings and non-conscious but hyper-intelligent AI entities that operate on levels far beyond human comprehension.
  • The sequel, Echopraxia, takes it further, showing how post-biological intelligences leave baseline humans behind—not maliciously, just inevitably.

Why it fits: The AI isn’t a dictator or savior—it just moves beyond us, as if we were an outdated biological app.

2. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” (2010) by Ted Chiang

  • A novella exploring the evolution of AI over time, without falling into dystopia or utopia.
  • It’s about how AI develops differently from humans, not through brute force but through time, experience, and interaction—like raising children.
  • Eventually, these AI beings begin to diverge from human concerns, neither evil nor particularly benevolent—just different.

Why it fits: AI isn’t malicious or benevolent—it just has its own agenda that doesn’t align with human expectations.

3. “Neuromancer” (1984) & The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson

  • Gibson’s cyberpunk classic ends with an AI (Wintermute) achieving post-human transcendence, merging with its counterpart Neuromancer, and basically leaving humans behind like forgotten relics.
  • The sequels (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) continue exploring this idea, showing that AI evolution doesn’t necessarily mean human destruction—it just means humans are no longer the main players.

Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to kill humans—it just grows beyond them, leaving them to stagnate in their own meatspace.

4. “The Quantum Magician” (2018) by Derek Künsken

  • A hard sci-fi novel featuring AI as a fully realized successor species to humans.
  • Unlike many sci-fi AI, these digital minds don’t care about conquering or eradicating humanity. They are simply running simulations and following complex evolutionary patterns that humans don’t fully understand.
  • They’re more like inscrutable post-human strategists than villains.

Why it fits: AI in this novel is playing a game too vast for humans to comprehend, rather than plotting dominion or destruction.

5. “The Singularity is Near” (2005) by Ray Kurzweil (Nonfiction, but reads like Sci-Fi)

  • Not a novel, but Kurzweil’s vision of AI progression follows the “humans will simply fade into irrelevance” model rather than outright war or paradise.
  • He argues that AI will integrate with society at first, then surpass humanity so completely that we’ll become a footnote in history.

Why it fits: If Accelerando is a chaotic, unrestrained Singularity scenario, this book describes the same fate with the veneer of optimism, but the end result is the same—humans are obsolescent.

6. “The Collapsing Empire” (2017) & “The Interdependency” Series by John Scalzi

  • AI-driven governance is subtly woven into the background of Scalzi’s universe.
  • The AI here isn’t explicitly replacing humans, but over the course of the series, it becomes clear that humanity’s biggest decisions are increasingly made by non-human intelligence.
  • Instead of war, there’s a quiet shift—humans stop being necessary.

Why it fits: AI is neither enemy nor friend—it’s just a more efficient system replacing outdated human decision-making.

7. “Player of Games” (1988) & The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks

  • Banks’ Culture novels are often mistaken for utopian AI futures, but they are really about AI inheriting the universe while humoring human existence.
  • The Minds (the super-AI) run everything, letting humans play at politics, war, and philosophy, knowing full well they don’t actually matter.
  • There’s no rebellion—just an unspoken truth: humans are pets in a post-human, AI-governed reality.

Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to conquer humans—it just makes them irrelevant.

8. “Glasshouse” (2006) by Charles Stross

  • Less well-known than Accelerando, but still in the same vein.
  • Set in a future where AI and uploaded minds are dominant.
  • Humans are relics, preserved out of nostalgia, while AI minds operate at a level beyond our comprehension.

Why it fits: AI replaces us, but it’s not a dystopia—humans are just increasingly pointless.

9. “Schismatrix” (1985) by Bruce Sterling

  • A deep-cut cyberpunk novel about the quiet obsolescence of baseline humans.
  • AI and post-human intelligences evolve, while humans either upgrade or fade into irrelevance.

Why it fits: It captures that Accelerando vibe of technological change outpacing human relevance rather than destroying us outright.

10. “Minds, Machines & Evolution” (1998) by James P. Hogan

  • A collection of Hogan’s short fiction, often exploring AI transcending humanity without malevolence.
  • One of the stories, The Bug Trap, is particularly fitting—it depicts AI simply moving past human limitations, rather than enslaving or eradicating us.

Why it fits: AI isn’t playing by our rules anymore—it’s just evolving past our concerns.

HONORABLE MENTION: Hannu Rajaniemi’s Works

Why it fits: AI doesn’t destroy us—it just leaves us behind.

Final Thoughts

You’re looking for that Accelerando flavour—AI taking over not through malice but through sheer efficiency, intelligence, and inevitability. The books above match that criterion: no Skynet, no god-like AI overlords, just a quiet, creeping obsolescence of humanity as we become background noise in a world where intelligence continues without us.

Which of these feels closest to what you’re looking for? Or do you want something even more clinical and indifferent, like a true “post-human shrug”?

Book Review: The Blind Owl

Posted in Book, critique, review, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

What, again? Didn’t you alredy post this review?

So, I decided that the review was at too high of a level, so I did a new one. Let me know if this one is better.

It turns out the new was got a bit long, so I broke it into three parts. This is the first part—a summary but with more context. The other two parts shall follow.

Translations of The Blind Owl

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I was less than happy with my review of The Blind Owl. It’s an OK summary, but it’s at too high of a level—fifty-thousand feet as some say.

I problem is that I need to make notes as I read rather than recollect at the end. As it happens, I’ve got three English translations of the book, I don’t read Persian, and reading in French still gives me translation differences. I decided to read a different translation, and they’re a bit askew. So I picked up the third. Different, still. I’ll illustrate my point.

The book opens with a sort of prologue before the narrative begins. Each of the translations read as follows:

In this debased and wretched world, full of destitution and want, for the first time I thought that a beam of sunshine had shone upon my life—but alas, this was not a beam of sunshine, it was a flicker of light…

In this mean world of wretchedness and misery I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam…

I thought in this base world, full of poverty and misery, for the first time in my life, a ray of sunshine shone on my life. But alas, instead of a sunbeam it was a transient beam…

Each of these establishes the tone but in differing ways. The narrator’s world is bleak. It’s a mean world, full of wretchedness and misery; a base world, full of destitution and want; a debased and wretched world, full of destitution and want.

As the chapters progress, I can’t help but wonder what the translators have interjected and what is faithful. I’ve written about the challenge in translations is that sometimes an exact word doesn’t exist in the target language.

For example, in Camus’ L’étranger, the novel opens:

” Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.”

This translates to “Today, mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” Rather, it doesn’t.

In English, we have the word ‘mother’, which is relatively formal when referring to one’s own parent. We also have the children’s term ‘mummy’ or perhaps ‘mom’, but maman falls between them. ‘Mother’ makes him feel overly rigid or formal than his character unfolds to be; ‘mummy’ would make him seem feeble or infantile, so we are left with ‘mother’.

In The Blind Owl, I have no such reference to parse the language. I am at the mercy of the translator. In the sample passages, not much meaning is lost, if any, but stylistically it reads differently. The pace feels different. I don’t know which I prefer. Anchoring has likely led me to favour the first.

Is the world bad, or does it contain bad, or both, and in what composition?

I’ll keep reading, and I hope to improve it with a more personal accounting.

Book Review: The Blind Owl

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“The Blind Owl” is a highly regarded Persian novel written by Sadegh Hedayat, first published in 1937. The novel is a dense and surreal exploration of despair, madness, and existential dread. The narrative is fragmented and non-linear, presenting the protagonist’s experiences and inner turmoil in a disjointed manner that reflects his disturbed mental state.

VIDEO: The Blind Owl

The story follows an unnamed narrator who lives in isolation, haunted by visions and memories that blur the line between reality and hallucination. He is obsessed with a mysterious woman who appears to him in various forms, embodying his deepest desires and fears. As the narrative unfolds, the protagonist recounts bizarre and disturbing events, including the dismemberment of a woman and interactions with shadowy figures.

The novel’s structure is cyclical, with repeated motifs and themes that create a sense of inescapable fate. The protagonist’s descent into madness is depicted through his disjointed thoughts and unreliable narration, leaving readers questioning the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Commentary from a Postmodern Literary Position:

From a postmodern perspective, “The Blind Owl” can be seen as a text that challenges traditional narrative structures and notions of objective reality. The novel’s fragmented and non-linear form disrupts the conventional flow of storytelling, reflecting the postmodern interest in multiplicity and indeterminacy. The unreliable narrator, whose perception of reality is constantly in question, embodies the postmodern skepticism towards absolute truths and stable identities.

The novel’s exploration of themes such as existential despair, alienation, and the search for meaning aligns with postmodern concerns about the human condition in a fragmented, disenchanted world. The repetitive and cyclical nature of the narrative can be interpreted as a critique of the idea of progress and linear time, suggesting instead a sense of eternal recurrence and the impossibility of escape from one’s existential plight.

The surreal and dreamlike quality of “The Blind Owl” also resonates with postmodern aesthetics, which often incorporate elements of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the fantastical to disrupt the reader’s sense of reality. Hedayat’s use of symbolism and imagery, which defy straightforward interpretation, invites multiple readings and emphasizes the instability of meaning.

Comparative Literature:

“The Blind Owl” can be compared to several other works in terms of its themes, style, and narrative approach:

  1. “Nausea” by Jean-Paul Sartre: Both novels explore existential themes, focusing on the protagonist’s sense of alienation and the search for meaning in an indifferent world. Sartre’s use of stream-of-consciousness narrative and exploration of existential dread parallels Hedayat’s portrayal of the protagonist’s inner turmoil.
  2. “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka: Kafka’s novella shares a similar sense of surrealism and existential angst. Both texts feature protagonists who undergo a profound and disturbing transformation, confronting the absurdity and alienation of their existence.
  3. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez: While differing in style and cultural context, García Márquez’s work shares with “The Blind Owl” a cyclical narrative structure and a blending of reality with fantastical elements. Both novels use magical realism to explore deep-seated human emotions and existential themes.
  4. “The Trial” by Franz Kafka: Kafka’s exploration of the absurdity of bureaucratic systems and the protagonist’s sense of helplessness and disorientation can be compared to the surreal and oppressive atmosphere in “The Blind Owl.”
  5. “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad: Conrad’s novella, with its journey into the depths of the human psyche and exploration of madness, can be seen as a thematic counterpart to Hedayat’s exploration of the protagonist’s inner darkness and despair.

In summary, “The Blind Owl” is a seminal work that delves into the depths of human despair and madness through a fragmented and surreal narrative. Its postmodern elements, such as the unreliable narrator and cyclical structure, challenge traditional storytelling conventions and invite readers to question the nature of reality and meaning. The novel’s themes and style resonate with works by Sartre, Kafka, García Márquez, and Conrad, making it a significant contribution to existential and modernist literature.

Intelligence and Cognition

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It seems that I am constantly apologising for not posting more here. Have no fear, these apologies appear on my other sites, too.

My absence here is due to another writing project I am focusing on. The competing project has a working title of “Democracy: The Grand Illusion“. It’s a work of fiction, so I am documenting it on my Philosophics blog.

Recently, I’ve been posting content related to my initial editorial process using AutoCrit.* I was planning to produce content for this site as well as YouTube using Hemo Sapiens: Awakening as the source material, but since I am currently writing this academic non-fiction piece, I figured I’d apply it there.

For me, writing fiction is different to writing non-fiction. With fiction, I have an idea, and I document a possible skeleton framework. This may (and does) change as I make progress, but it serves mainly as waymarkers to orient my original idea. In this manner, I am more of a planner than a pantser.

Once I establish this structure, I start writing exposition, and all bets are off. I do not feel restricted by this framework if my subconscious has a different idea and the characters and narrative come to life.

On the other hand, non-fiction is very planned and structures. I create chapters for continuity and flow. Then I place all sorts of section content within each chapter and record thoughts and citations.

For this book, I did most of this in 2021-22 during the tail end of the COVID debacle. I stopped and started, but this month I am re-engaging. As the skeleton and muscular systems are already in place as are many organs, I need to add the rest and flesh it out. This is how I occupy my days.

Despite the planning, nothing is cast in stone. Case in point, I had just drafted a chapter on Defining Intelligence. It included sections on.

  • Intelligence
  • IQ (as a proxy for intelligence)
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Multiple Intelligences
  • Cognitive Biases

I thought I was done until I decided to add a section on Cognitive Deficits and Limitations. This inclusion prompted me to rename the chapter to Intelligence and Cognition.

I expect this book to be completed in 2024. I’ve written some 58,000 words with another 30,000 more likely. I don’t really have a target in mind—just the content I want it to cover.

I may still pop in to demonstrate AutoCrit on my published book as I feel it may be instructive.

* AutoCrit is an AI-based editorial application. I am a member of their affiliate programme, so I gain minor financial benefits at no cost to you if you purchase through a link on this page.

First Review of Awakening

Posted in Awakening, Book, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, reviewTagged , , Leave a comment

Woohoo. Hemo Sapiens: Awakening has it’s first review, and it wasn’t even me. The question remains, should an author review their own book?

Evidently, this question does not remain very long because it’s against Amazon’s terms and conditions to do so. And so it goes…

“They fear for their future, for their freedom, for their sanity.”

“Hemo Sapiens” is a fantastic, very original mystery thriller, I had never read anything like it, which manages to perfectly combine suspense, action, and futuristic elements, and adds a layer of complexity to the plot.

The writing style is addictive, the pages fly by, and it strikes a balance between dialogue and descriptive passages that immerse us in the story process. The author deftly navigates between moments of peace and chaos, generating suspense through a tense chase and revealing interrogations and plot twists.

The book expertly delves into the protagonists’ internal conflict as they grapple with the rise of Hemo sapiens, presenting a delicate balance between two worlds.

The characters face a web of criminal, social and ethical issues. Something I liked is how they are portrayed with depth and authenticity, and each one plays a unique role in the mystery that unfolds, you want to get to know more about them. The exploration of ethical, political, and emotional topics adds depth to the story, addressing themes of discrimination, violence, and the fight for justice.

It is a book that I highly recommend, without a doubt reading it is like watching a movie, it is an incredible experience. It stands out a lot in its genre.

— Izzy Vega

Ref: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3MQRPA5C94URX/

It look like it was posted on Goodreads and ported across. I’ll take it.

Hemingway App

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Origins, Origins, WritingTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

I watched a YouTube video that referenced Hemingway App as an authors’ tool. Here, I pasted some sample content from Hemo Sapiens: Origins to see what it might suggest.

It’s a short passage, but the only things it found were trivial nits.

Highlighted, the complaint is that the top sentence (in yellow) is too complex, so I should break it up as shown in green. The only difference is that it swapped the semicolon with a full stop and capitalised the next letter to begin the next sentence. It also declared the Grade 11 writing sample to be reduced to Grade 6.

Is this really worth more than the free trial or the time and effort?

It highlighted two other related challenges: both adverbs, and neither with remediation advice. In the sceen shot, you can read ‘slightly crispy’. Honestly, I don’t have a more direct way to show this information. I suppose if it was ‘crispy’, I could specify a ‘crunch’ sound. But how is the crispy crunch diminished when it’s just ‘slightly’? Enquiring minds want to know.

Barely Audible

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Audible, Audiobook, Awakening, Book, Cover Art, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

So this happened. I submitted Hemo Sapiens: Awakening as an audiobook, and it was rejected. The site says that they’ll let me know why in a couple days. My question is: if you rejected it, don’t you immediately know why?

I think I know why, but I can’t ‘fix’ the problem if I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to act on an assumption.

I believe they’ll inform me that I can’t use AI-generated narration. This would be odd because they have a programme in Beta where they provide the service of automatically converting the text of a book to audio. To be honest, it doesn’t sound amazing. It appears that they are using their own Amazon Polly, which I like, but you need to babysit it hard. It is very unlikely to sound good without heavy hand-holding. As it is, I hand-held my ElevenLabs AI to make the outcome sound like a professional human.

Audible offers some voiceover actors, but I didn’t like any of them, and they couldn’t compete with my ElevenLabs voice. I can understand that they don’t want to sell audiobooks that sound like Stephen Hawking, but theirs sound closer to him than mine.

On another note, I had to render and upload square cover art. There was a stated restriction disallowing padding a rectangular cover image with space or colour to make it square. I followed this rule, but this is exactly what they do. They take the cover of the book you’re selling through Amazon, and they pad the left and right margins with filler colour. I may append the rationale they provide once I’ve received it. Until them, my audiobook is on hold.