A personal note from Deborah

Lovely friends, I haven't been around much lately except for the occasional book review or shared post. I've been dealing with a ton of LifeStuff, including taking care of a basal cell carcinoma (excised, clear margins, yay!) and upcoming knee replacement surgery, which is scheduled for first thing Monday (Oct. 14) morning. I expect to come home the same day, assuming I can eat, walk, and pee. (Isn't there a book by that title?)

Good thoughts are always welcome. Meanwhile, take good care of yourselves and tell the folk who are important to you that you love them.

Blessings, Deborah

Guest Post: Writer Brain: Artificial Not So Intelligence, by Judith Tarr

Writer Brain: Artificial Not So Intelligence 

by Judith Tarr

The authorsphere has been rumbling for a while about the hot! new! shiny! tech! that has all the bros so excited they’re shoving it into everything and making it difficult to impossible to opt out. Generative AI is supposed to save the world. Take the work out of work. Replace the struggling human brain with a set of prompts. Instant art, hardly any waiting.

This isn’t the artificial sentience of Murderbot or the Justice of Toren or even Star Trek’s Computer. It’s basically a wood chipper, but for words and images. Dump them all in, hope something useful comes out.

The problem is, at this stage in its evolution, what’s mostly coming out is garbage. A book on mushrooms that labels a deadly variety safe and delicious. Sources for academic papers that don’t exist, or are garbled or distorted. “Art” that’s off in subtle and not so subtle ways—humans with extra fingers, rooms with weirdly angled walls and ceilings, skies that never existed on this planet. It’s getting so you can’t trust anything you see online.

It's not just that the thing is not ready for prime time. It’s that it’s being pushed hard, and it’s being backed with buckets and buckets of money. Billions. For basically faery gold.

And even worse than that, it needs massive amounts of energy to run. They’re actually talking about reopening nuclear plants in order to generate enough power for the huge surge of AI that the big tech companies are avidly investing in.

All of that is bad in the way of absolute decadence. A culture so far along in its devolution that it indulges in orgies of extravagance signifying effectively nothing.

So what’s the point?

Or rather, where’s it all coming from? What’s going into the chipper? How is it being trained to come out with its confident pronouncements of, all too often, deceptive nonsense?

That’s where the authorsphere, and the artistsphere along with it, is raising some good and holy hell. Because authors’ and artists’ work is being scraped as it’s called, swept up and dumped into the chipper. And it’s not being acknowledged or compensated. It’s being stolen, in a word. As one bro lamented, “How can we make money off AI if we have to pay for the source material?”

Short Book Reviews: An Occult Mexican Horror Film Thriller

 Silver Nitrate, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an amazing writer, bringing together sympathetic (if wonderfully weird) characters, pitch-perfect tropes, and Mexican settings. I adore some of her books more than others, but they’re all really good reads. I didn’t connect immediately with Silver Nitrate but when it grabbed me, it didn’t let go until the breathless finish.

Here, Moreno-Garcia throws together an unlikely pair of lifelong friends (ungainly sound editor Montserrat and tarnished but swoon-worthy soap-opera star Tristán), the 1930s Mexican horror movie industry, Nazi white supremacist obsession with the occult, and magic ignited by movies made with highly flammable silver nitrate film stock. And it all works. Brilliantly.

Just about the time Montserrat finds herself on the way out of a job in a 1990s Mexico City film studio, Tristán takes up with his elderly neighbor, reclusive legendary horror cult director, Abel. Abel convinces the two friends to help him finish a movie that was imbued with magic by a Nazi occultist. Intrigued although skeptical of the claims of the cult’s supernatural powers, Montserrat and Tristán agree. This is when things begin, slowly but with gathering speed, to go seriously pear-shaped.

Glimpses into the lower echelons of the film industry, peeks into a subgenre I never knew existed (Mexican horror films), and two compelling characters carried me along as hints and nuances deepened and formed ever more horrific connections. By the time Tristán started seeing the ghost of his dead girlfriend, it was clear we “weren’t in Kansas anymore.” As with her other works, Moreno-Garcia’s prose is strong and vivid, and she handles relationships as well as thriller-paced action with consummate skill.

To Everyone on the New Year