Roderick “I know why you seek the lost city of Xulthar,” the old crone said as she peered over the top of her crystal ball. “But the riches you find there shall bring you naught but evil and sorrow.” Roderick the Young of House Valtan rolled his shoulders back as his sharp eyes scanned the… Continue reading The Riches of Xulthar: Chapter 1
Author: Joe Vasicek
Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.
The Riches of Xulthar: Prologue (AI Draft)
Long had the plague years ravaged the land, decimating every household and filling the ground with the dead. Crops rotted unharvested in the fields, entire towns were wiped clean of inhabitants, and the cities swelled with panicked migrants fleeing the spectre of death, only to spread the shadow of the reaper. No kingdom or principality… Continue reading The Riches of Xulthar: Prologue (AI Draft)
The Riches of Xulthar: Prologue
Long had the plague years ravaged the land. No household was left unscathed by it, no graveyard was left unfilled. Crops rotted unharvested in the fields, while towns and villages lay devoid of inhabitants. At first, the cities swelled with migrants fleeing the specter of death, only to fall as the fleeing refugees spread the… Continue reading The Riches of Xulthar: Prologue
Some major news about my first AI-assisted novel
The Riches of Xulthar is now complete! I’m sending it out to my editor this afternoon, and if all goes well, it will be available in all formats by the end of September. In the meantime, I have decided to post the entire thing chapter by chapter on my blog. I’ll be posting the final,… Continue reading Some major news about my first AI-assisted novel
A two year-old’s solution to the trolley problem
Best comment: “Kid be like, theres no ethical dilema if you’re not ethical.”
The Sudowrite draft of The Riches of Xulthar is finished!
It only took about a month, but it would have been much faster if I’d used Story Engine. Honestly, I probably could have generated the text in a week if I’d used that tool, or perhaps even an afternoon. Instead, I outlined the project myself, wrote the first couple of paragraphs for each individual scene,… Continue reading The Sudowrite draft of The Riches of Xulthar is finished!
A letter to Christina Paxson, President of Brown University
President Christina Paxson, I am sending this email to you because your voice mailbox is full, no doubt from listeners (such as myself) of popular conservative commentator Matt Walsh who gave us your (publicly listed) number and email address and encouraged us to reach out to you. Lest you think that this email constitutes harassment,… Continue reading A letter to Christina Paxson, President of Brown University
In Defense of Black & White Morality
I was born in 1984, and for most of my life, stories with black and white morality—in other words, stories about the struggle between good and evil, with good guys who are good and bad buys who are bad—have been considered unfashionable and out of style. This is especially true of fantasy, where grimdark has… Continue reading In Defense of Black & White Morality
Short-form vs. long-form fantasy
For the last month, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the fantasy genre, rereading all of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and a bunch of the other ones too, by authors like L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, Robert Jordan, etc. I’ve also been reading a… Continue reading Short-form vs. long-form fantasy
Would you read an AI-written novel?
That is the question, more or less, that I posed in subject header of my last email newsletter. The goal was to be a bit provocative, of course, but I did genuinely want to hear from my subscribers on this topic, and in the author’s note I shared a lot more of my thoughts on… Continue reading Would you read an AI-written novel?