Category Archives: Fiction

July 3, 2024 · 3:24 pm

The Wager: Fun summer read of mutiny and murder (and a dose of colonial introspection)

David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is spectacularly good. Non-fiction, spectacularly good you say? Well, willing to try because it’s as close to historical fiction as it comes while still being non-fiction. Told with all the narrative oomph you’d expect of a thriller, The Wager charts (get it? a nautical joke?) the efforts of the British navy in the mid 1700s to secretly capture a Spanish ship filled with gold and treasure in some hard-to-understand war between the two empires.

From the beginning the expedition seems doomed. The book catalogues the near-impossible effort of just finding enough sailors as almost everyone – rightfully – viewed naval war as doom and ran away. Like soldiers running through the street capturing any able-ish bodied man or boy and forcing them on board. As you can imagine truly committed to the war effort. And then setting out with barely a plan, at the wrong time of year, with not the right crew and you can imagine things did not Go Well. Enter lots of waves and broken ship parts and some light cannibalism and casual encounters with naval battle.

After the ship wreck (spoiler: there is a ship wreck) and the mutiny and the two incredibly improbable successful returns to England, what really captivates -and what Grann does so well to weave throughout the book – is the importance of owning narrative. As the two different groups try to persuade the public and the naval authorities of their version of events the reader comes to recognize the way the very history they’re reading – contested, partial, necessarily incomplete – does similar work. Toward the end and in the concluding chapters Grann makes more explicit the way Britain and all empires used this narrative authority to justify their colonial ambitions and violence, and the way this pattern of declaring authority by means of ‘owning the narrative’ persists in the present.

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July 3, 2024 · 12:27 am

Many Books About AI; or, I like my job

You may have heard about this thing, ChatGPT? No? Well, clearly we don’t talk as often as we used to or you’d be rolling your eyes right now. Oh the suffering of my family and book club friends when it comes to another instance of Erin-talks-about-AI-and-how-it-is-changing-everything. Note: I’m not making a value judgement about AI, just that it might be worth spending a minute thinking about it. And you know, for someone who likes to work, my job of late has been AI things and so I have read a book or two on the subject. And found myself extremely far behind in posting about those books, so here you go: a whirlwind tour.

God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn – Recommended on the Ezra Klein show and a fantastic (really) consideration of theology, artificial intelligence, and what it means (or doesn’t mean) to be human. If the human argument about what has separated us from animals has been ‘intelligence,’ and now the argument for what separates us from robot machines is ’emotive bodily feeling’ then… well, that’s the premise of this excellent book.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell – I read this book not once, but thrice (thrice!) in the last six months for its accessible and patient explanations of the history of artificial intelligence and its current technological underpinnings. Light on the impact of the technology on the future of humanity (which is fine!) the book does a thorough and accessible account of what you need to know about how AI works such that you can hold a reasonably intelligent conversation about it (or at least – and don’t tell M. – enough that people *think you get it).

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman – I don’t know about this one. To be fair I listened to it as an audiobook while running and so some of my sense of its calamitous predictions may owe more to my exhaustion than to the book itself. But if memory serves this one does not think we are ready – individually or collectively – for the now unstoppable change bearing down on us. Granted not everyone agrees that the disruption of AI is akin to that of fire or agriculture, but Suleyman does, and spends the book explaining in both general statements and detail (though leaning more on the general statements) the likely impacts of such a change. This book, like Mitchell’s, does have some helpful explanations of the technology itself which for a new reader may be appreciated.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick – Definitely the best choice if you are new to AI or new to caring about it or barely sure you ought to care about it but tired of your beloved blogger talking about it. Written for an every audience, this book explains both a brief history of AI (emphasis on brief) before talking about some potential impacts of generative AI on the workforce and on individual and then advancing arguments for how to use AI in your life and, more importantly, how urgent it is that there be “serious” conversations about AI. I tend to think calling for ‘conversations’ is a bit of a dodge, but I suppose calling for legislation might be beyond the scope.

The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil – Explains how computers will most certainly become smarter than humans and what that will mean for humanity and ideas of consciousness. For someone beset with death anxiety, some reassuring hope that I’ll live forever in an AI simulation. IF I’M NOT ALREADY….

The AI Revolution in Medicine by Peter Lee and some others – I was going to be facilitating a thing for health care professionals about AI and so I read this book and my take away is that health care and doctors are already using generative AI and there should probably be some kind of plan for that from or by someone. Not it.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian – If you’ve heard the parable of the paperclips that take over the world because their human programmers tell them just to keep making paper clips until they destroy humanity in search of metal then you’ve heard about the alignment problem. It is a problem. Happily for this literary scholar, Christian seems to think this is a problem best solved with a multi- inter-disciplinary approach. If it can be solved at all, and the consequences (dire for all paper clip lovers) avoided.

If you were going to read just one? I’d say A Guide for Thinking Humans if you want to get what AI is about, God Human Animal Machine if you don’t care much for AI but agree that it’s worth thinking about, and Co-Intelligence if you’re ready to start using ChatGPT but haven’t know where to start. Though if that is true, we barely know one another at all.

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May 10, 2024 · 1:04 pm

The Adversary

When I was wide awake and alert, reading Michael Crummey’s The Adversary was a total joy. Fantastic descriptions, layered scenes where every action and reaction has triple meaning, beautiful language. Too often though I was reading it just before bed and my half-awake brain didn’t have enough focus to attend to the layers and I’d find myself having ‘read’ three pages and not remembering at all what had happened or to whom and so re-reading it again the following night (to much the same effect).

Which is to say – this is a great book that you should read when conditions allow you to slowly and carefully appreciate it.

When I did have those occasions what I enjoyed most was the tension between individual characters and the Fates (classic man versus nature / man versus god conflict structures) whether that was plague, or storm, or ice. The resignation of the individual characters to accepting these bigger-than-self constraints stands against the quotidian conflicts on their daily lives, eruptions of brutal violence, and, as the title suggests, the structuring conflict between the Widow and her brother Abe. While the Widow is hardly an easily sympathetic character, I nevertheless found myself frustrated for her – that so much of what she attempts to do is constrained by gender – but in the end I suppose it’s her hubris rather than her gender that gets in the way. And the birds.

Enjoyed, too, the references to the orphans of The Innocents a fantastic companion piece to this historical drama. So take both with you on vacation this summer and give in to the unique pleasure of reading about 19th century Newfoundland – which I get it, does not sound like it’s going to be gripping. But it is! Unless you’re very tired. I don’t know anyone tired these days. All of us: sharp, alert, ready to read.

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April 15, 2024 · 8:03 pm

The Fake: Not to be confused with The Fraud

Is it an accident that I’ve read two (great) books in as many months concerned with the stability of truth? Maybe. Probably more that I am so worried about ideas of reliability, trustworthiness, agreed upon Facts that I dwell only among books that share my anxiety.

In this – great – one by Zoe Whittall we follow Shelby and Gibson as they each meet and fall for (in different ways) Cammie, a spectacular con-artist who convinces them both of a series of escalating tragedies that have befallen her and why she needs their help. Eventually the lies unravel (so much to be carried by that metaphor) and Cammie is caugh out. Shelby insists none of it is her fault. That the lies upon lies owe to some kind of mental illness and that an intervention and support can help Cammie – perhaps, she speculates, Cammie is a narcissist and if she was only helped and better understood she could find her way back to the truth. Such hope proves misplaced, but still the reader is offered this explanation for harm. And while the book does – in its epilogue at least – point to the persistence of that harm – how Gibson can never properly trust again, how Shelby’s own mental health deteriorates following the dissolution of her friendship with Cammie – it doesn’t go quite as far as The Fraud in making the connection to our current moment of fractured relationship between what is said/read or seen and what is true.

Which is fine. It doesn’t have to be a novel about the end of shared facts. It can be – as it is – an excellent consideration of relationships, of how we grieve, and most importantly of who and how we trust.

If we imagine a future where we need to teach ourselves more intentionally how to tell what is true from what is declarative fiction the Fake would be high on my reading list. Oh, so yes, that time is now, so go on, read it.

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