This is one of the scariest and most horrifying videos I’ve seen on YouTube in a while. The first time I watched it was outrage-inducing enough, but then I watched it a second time, and wow. Our education system isn’t broken, it’s functioning exactly as the elites intended. And that is why so many millennials and zoomers can’t read, can’t write… and honestly, can’t even think.
This video is well worth an hour of your time. Possibly two.
Over the past few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with AI writing and finding ways to incorporate it into my writing process. The goal so far has been twofold:
I’ve accomplished both of those things, but I can’t hit them consistently without burning out. Writing with AI has proven key to both of them, but I feel like I need a lot more practice with AI-assisted writing before I’ve achieved any level of mastery. Once I have mastered AI-assisted writing, however, I should not only be able to achieve both goals consistently, producing a much higher quantity of work, but should also be able to maintain or exceed the current quality of my writing as well.
However, I was thinking about it from a reader’s perspective on my morning walk last week, wondering what I would think if, say, David Gemmell was still alive and writing Drenai books, or Roger Zelazny was still alive and writing Amber books. What would I think if either of them announced that they had found a way to incorporate AI into their writing process, so that they could produce a new Drenai/Amber book once every month, instead of once every year? Better yet, what if Andrew Klavan—who is both still alive and still writing Cameron Winter books—announced that he would start publishing new books monthly. As a fan of all these writers, what would I think of that?
Assuming that there was no drop-off in the quality of these new, AI-assisted books, I would find this really exciting, and would probably become a much bigger fan, simply from the fact that I’m reading so much new stuff. However, after a while this might become too costly to me to keep up, leading me to fall away and not be quite so current on what they’re producing. I would still love them as authors, but if they published too quickly, I might have to take a break after a while—and if they continued to publish at that rate, I might never catch up. After all, there are lots and lots of authors that I love, and I can’t dedicate more than a fraction of my reading time to any particular one of them.
So there’s probably a sweet spot, between publishing too much and publishing too little. Most authors are probably on the Patrick Rothfuss / George R.R. Martin side of that line, where fans wish they would write more and write more quickly. But at a certain point, it is possible to overwhelm most readers by writing too much. Of course, there will always be a core group of fans who will read everything much faster than you could ever possibly write, even with AI assistance, but if that’s the only group you’re catering to, then you probably won’t ever have more than a cult following, because you won’t be able to convert casual readers into superfans.
With all of that said, I feel like I’ve gotten to a good place right now, where I’m publishing a free short story every month. I think that’s actually been a really effective way to turn casual readers into fans, and to keep my name fresh in the minds of my readers. And if Gemmell, or Zelazny, or Klavan were producing a free short story every month, I would definitely subscribe to their newsletters and drop everything to read it.
So keeping up the free short story per month is probably a good idea. But for novels, it might be better to release a new one every two or three months instead. Free short stories are much less of a time and money burden on the readers, and thus are effective at turning fans into superfans. But with the novels, which do take more time and money to read, it’s probably better to throttle that back a little bit.
The interesting thing to me is what that means for my creativing process, especially once I’ve reached the point where it takes less than a month for me to produce a novel. If I’m only publishing a novel every 2-3 months, that means that I can—and probably should—take a break between each novel WIP. Which means that the thing I should be shooting for isn’t to maintain a writing speed of one novel per month, month after month after month, but to hit that speed in creative bursts, taking some down-time to replenish the creative well and prepare for the next project.
It’s a very different writing paradigm from the one I’ve been following for the past decade. Until now, I’ve basically always had a novel WIP that I’ve actively been working on, and whenever I feel like I need a break, I usually move on to a different novel WIP. From time to time, I’ll “take a month off” to work on short stories, but the goal there has always been to write X number of stories in no more than a month or two, once again making writing the focus instead of recharging the creative well.
How would things be different if instead, I told myself “I’m taking a break in order to prepare myself to write my next novel,” with a plan for books and other media to consume in order to get things ready for it? And then, instead of taking several months or even years to write the project, to produce it in just a few weeks of white-hot creative heat, afterwards necessitating a break for a while just to cool down? Until now, I’ve never tried anything like that, because I haven’t thought myself capable of producing work that quickly. Indeed, the very thought of taking an extended break from having an active writing WIP has struck me as being lazy. But now that I know I can produce that quickly, perhaps this is a new paradigm that I ought to at least explore.
For my current WIP, Captive of the Falconstar, I’m not stressing out about finishing it in less than a month. But I am following all the benchmarks that I developed, and watching closely to see what takes more time to write than I thought, and what takes less. And it may very well turn out that the best way to improve quality is to get into that white-hot creative heat that comes from producing quickly, so that’s something that I’m watching closely as well.
First of all, I don’t think that Nick Cave is entirely wrong. Laying aside how ChatGPT is just one of the many LLMs that are publicly available, and that using it as a stand-in for all of generative AI is like saying “AOL Online” when you mean “the internet,” he does make a fair point that using generative AI as a replacement for basic human creativity is wrong.
What he doesn’t understand is that using AI this way is also counterproductive. He blithely assumes that it takes not skill or effort whatsoever to use these AI tools—that all one has to do is tell ChatGPT what to write, and it will magically produce something if not great, then at least publishable. But as someone who has written several AI-assisted novels and short stories, I can assure you that it does take effort to produce something more than merely passable. Indeed, with longer works like novels, I can assure you that our current AI models are incapable of producing even passable work without considerable human intervention.
This is why I call it AI-assisted writing, as opposed to AI writing. When you do it right, the AI tools don’t replace your inner human creativity, but augment and enhance it, making things possible that were either impossible before, or that required a prohibitive degree of struggle. Writing with AI is still a form of creativity, though it might not look exactly like previous forms. But isn’t that also true of writing on a computer vs. writing longhand? Does it take any less creativity to write a novel on Microsoft Word than it does to write it on parchment with a fountain pen?
Granted, the technological leap from word processor to generative AI is much more profound and fundamental than the leap from pen and paper to typewriter, or from typewriter to MS Word. Speaking from experience, I can say that writing a novel with ChatGPT or Sudowrite feels a lot more like directing a play with an amateur (and very stupid) actor than it feels like wrestling with the empty page, at least in the early generative stages. But it’s still, fundamentally, a creative act—and that’s the main thing that Nick Cave misses in his rant. Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write them a novel, just like anyone can bang their hands on a piano or strum their fingers across the strings of a guitar. But to produce something good—that requires effort.
However, there is an even deeper level where Nick Cave is wrong here, and that is in the unspoken assumption that the difficulty in creating something is the thing that gives it value. It’s the same principle that Karl Marx expounded in his labor theory of value: that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it, or in this case, the creative and artistic value. That’s just wrong.
Do we love J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings because it took him several decades to write it, and largely represents the greatest product of his life’s work? Obviously not—otherwise, every amateur writer who’s been polishing and repolishing the same unfinished novel for the last twenty years must necessarily be the next Tolkien, no matter the fact that their book reads more like the Eye of Argon than The Fellowship of the Ring.
So if it’s not the creative struggle or the amount of human effort that ultimately gives art its value, what does? The same thing that gives a product or service its economic value: the utility that it provides to the person who consumes it. In other words, the thing that gives art its value is the goodness, truth, and beauty that it brings into the lives of those who receive it.
This is especially true of writing, which is perhaps the most collaborative of all the arts. Without a reader to read it, a book is nothing more than processed and flattened wood pulp full of meaningless squiggles (even less than that for an ebook). When I read a book, I care not a whit for how much work it took for the author to come up with it. Same with the music I listen to, or the games that I play. What I care about is how it makes me think, feel, or experience the world.
And if it’s possible to bring more goodness, truth, and beauty into the world by using generative AI, so what? If it’s easier than writing a novel the old way, does that somehow mean it’s “cheating”? If the answer to that question is yes, please tell me why you don’t churn your own butter, or hunt your own food, or chop your own wood and burn it to heat your house—because all of those applications of modern technology are “cheating” in exactly the same way. Also, I hope all the books in your personal library are handmade, illuminated manuscripts, because the printing press is far more of a “cheat” than generative AI, as the last few hundred years of history clearly shows.
Nicholas Cave is wrong. ChatGPT is not the most “fiendish” thing “eat[ing] away at [our] creative spirit.” Our humanity is far more resilient and anti-fragile than he gives it credit. Those who try to replace human creativity with AI will fail, not because of artists like Cave who stubbornly resist the “temptation” to use these tools, but because of those who embrace the new technology with an open mind, and discover that our humanity is not a liability, but our greatest asset—a premise that Cave ironically rejects with his fearmongering about our fundamental replaceability.
So machine learning artificial intelligence has really been blowing up this past month, probably because of ChatGPT and all of the fascinating things that people are doing with it. I’ve been getting into it myself, using it to help write or improve my book descriptions, and also experimenting with it for writing stories.
At this point, any original fiction that ChatGPT writes is about the same quality as something written by an overly eager six year-old (minus the grammar and spelling errors), but I can see how that could change in the future, especially on a language learning model that’s trained on, say, Project Gutenberg, or the complete bibliographies of a couple of hundred major SF&F writers. The technology isn’t quite there yet, but in a few years it could be.
But apparently, that hasn’t stopped hordes of amateur writers and/or warrior forum types from using ChatGPT to spam the major magazines with AI-written stories. In fact, Clarkesworld recently closed to submissions because they were getting flooded with “stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI.” Neil Clarke wrote an interesting blog post on this problem, saying that this is a major growing problem for all of the magazines and that they will probably have to change the way they do business to deal with it.
So will AI eventually become so good that it replaces writers altogether? I don’t think so, and here’s why.
The gap between an AI that can do 100% of what a fiction writer can do and an AI that can do 90% is actually much wider than the gap between an AI that can do 90% and an AI that can only do 50%. That’s because both the 90%-effective AI and the 50%-effective AI require collaboration with a human in order to do the job. Neither of them can fully replace the human, though a human-AI team may be able to do the work of many humans working alone.
If we ever get to the point where AI replaces storytellers completely, we have much bigger problems than a few out-of-work science fiction writers. Storytelling lies at the heart of what it means to be human: we call ourselves “homo sapiens,” but we really should call ourselves “homo narrans,” since story is how we make sense of everything in our world. If an AI can replace that, then we as a species have become obsolete.
But I don’t think we’re going to ever reach that point. My wife is currently getting a PhD in computer science—specifically in machine learning and language models—and she believes that there is an inherent tradeoff between intelligences that can specialize well, and intelligences that can generalize well. AIs are master specialists, but humans are master generalists. If we ever build an AI that’s a master generalist, we may find that it’s actually much less intelligent than an average human, because of the tradeoff.
But all of that is purely speculative at this point. Right now, we really only have AIs that can do about 20% of what a fiction writer can do. In the coming years, we may ramp that up to 50% or even 90%, but anything less than 100% is not going to fully replace me.
However, that doesn’t mean that the thing we currently call “writing” isn’t going to change in some pretty dramatic ways, much as how the internal combustion engine dramatically changed the thing we call “driving.” And with these changes, we may very well get to the point where the market just can’t support as many professional writers, and the vast majority of us have to find other lines of work.
Conversely, it may actually expand the market for “reading” and create new demand for “writers,” as “reading” becomes more interactive and “writing” turns into an AI-mediated collaboration with the “reader.” Kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure that writes itself, based on the parameters set by the “writer.”
I have no idea, but the possibilities are fascinating, and the writers who are sure to lose are the ones who fail to confront the fact that their whole world is about to change—indeed, is already changing.
I think what it’s going to come down to is who owns the tools: not just who can use them, but who can modify them, personalize them, and use them to create original work. If copyright law decrees that the person who owns the AI also owns anything created with the AI’s assistance, that is going to be a major buzzkill… unless we get to the point where everyone can have their own personalized AI, which would be pretty cool. It would also solve a lot of the problems emerging from all of the super-woke filters that are getting slapped on ChatGPT.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the day where I can use an AI model to write fifty novels across a dozen pen names in a single year. What an incredible force multiplier that would be! But only if those novels are “mine,” whatever we determine that means.
So really, instead of arguing about whether AI will replace authors, what we really ought to be talking about are the aspects of writing and storytelling that drive us to create in the first place, and how those aspects can translate into a world where the nature of “writing” looks radically different than it does right now.
There is one problem that is unique to the written word, and it’s something that every writer has to confront when making the leap from amateur to professional (or even just from an amateur who dabbles in prose to an amateur who finishes what they start). The problem can best be summed up by this:
Why should I bother writing this story if I already know how it ends?
Unlike visual media such as TV, movies, video games, or illustrations, the art of the written word exists 100% in the reader’s head. These things we call “words” are really just symbols that convey thought from one mind to another, and have zero meaning outside of the head of the person reading. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a classic novel written in a foreign language that you don’t understand, and see how well you enjoy it.
But when we read, we like to be surprised on some level. There is something about the novelty of the story that appeals to us—indeed, that’s why we call them “novels.” The trouble is that the very act of creating a novel kills the novelty of it. At some point, you know how it’s going to end, and after that point the act of writing becomes a chore—or rather, it can be, unless you find something else about the process that fulfills you.
Some professional writers deliberately put off that moment for as long as they can, never figuring out their ending until it comes as surprise, even to them. Others look for fulfillment in something else, like the artfulness of their prose, or the dramatic suspense built up by their use of language. Still others just plow ahead, accepting this loss of novelty as a cost of doing business.
But however they choose to deal with it, every writer has to confront this problem in some manner before they make the leap from amateur to professional. And this is perhaps the biggest reason why I’m not too worried about AI replacing me as an author: because even an AI model that can do 90% of what I do will still require its human collaborator to address this problem.
Of course, the amateur vs. professional problem will affect some genres more than others: “write me a romance just like ____ where the male love interest has black hair instead and works in my office” is going to be just fine for a romance novel addict who just wants their happily-ever-after without any uncomfortable surprises. But we already have this: it’s called fanfiction.
Which is not to say that all fanfiction is formulaic and predictable. But the thing that sets fanfiction apart from original fiction are the things make it a derivative work: things like characters and settings that are already well-established, or a rehashing of storylines that were created by someone else.
This is an area where I think AI shows the most promise, and will turn out to be the most disruptive: not in creating original works, but in creating derivative works. Imagine if you could plug a novel into ChatGPT and tell it to rewrite the ending so that the girl ends up with your favorite character, or your favorite villain wins in the end. ChatGPT can’t do that very well right now, but I don’t think we’re far from building an AI language learning model that can—especially if it’s trained on actual books, instead of online content.
What I foresee is a world where AI blurs the line between fanfiction and original fiction so much that it becomes normal to read a bunch of these derivative works after you’ve read the original. Indeed, it may become a game to see who can make the most popular derivative work, and the popularity of some of them may very well exceed the popularity of the original.
Or it might become normal to run everything you read through an AI filter that removes offensive language, or the sex scenes that you were going to skip anyway (or conversely, an AI filter that adds offensive language and sex scenes). Taken to an extreme, this could lead to some really dystopian outcomes that further divide our already polarized world. We’ll have to see how it shakes out.
But all of this derivative content is only possible if there’s original content to derive it from. And while AI may lower the barrier of entry somewhat to creating original content (or not, since there really aren’t any barriers to entry right now, aside from the time and practice it takes to become proficient at your craft), the problem of “but I already know how it ends” will keep most dabblers and amateurs in the realm of creating derivative works, not original ones.
The act of “writing” and “reading” may change dramatically based on the force-multiplying effect of these tools. We may even get to a point where “writing” and “reading,” as most of us understand it, bear little resemblance to how we understand it today. But unless our very humanity becomes obsolete, I’m confident that I will still be able to carve out a place for myself as a writer.
I am amazed at how many books I’ve read so far this year. Looking just at my resolution to read all of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels, I started with only 32 out of 110 read, and now I’m nearly at 100. Granted, for a lot of those I only read the first and last chapter, but I also read several dozen of them cover to cover—and I’ve also read a bunch of other books, too.
What was the thing that pushed me over the tipping point? I used to only read two or three books a month, if that. Then my wife and I started taking our reading time more seriously, taking our family to the library once a week and setting aside an hour each night to read before going to bed. She helped me to make a reading log to keep track of everything, and that certainly helped a lot. It also helped to have specific reading goals, like read all of the Hugo and Nebula winning books this year.
But the thing that really kicked my reading into high gear was to start keeping a reading journal. I used to have one back in high school, but all I really used it for was to save quotes, and I lost it sometime before I got married. But I remembered how that helped me to read more back in high school, so a couple of months ago I decided to start a new one.
The reading journal I keep now is handwritten in a composition notebook. I just prefer the feel of pen on paper, especially for something private like this. And it is a private journal, unlike the daily diary that I hope to share with my kids and grandkids someday. Maybe I’ll share it with close family, but for now, I’m keeping it only for myself.
If I weren’t an author, I might cross-post things from my reading journal to Goodreads and other social media sites, but since this is what I do for a living, I think it’s better to keep my reviews to myself. After all, I don’t want to give a book a bad review, only to find that several of my fans consider it their favorite book. I also want to avoid attracting the ire of any online outrage mobs, which is why I don’t post much of anything to Goodreads anymore. That’s also why I decided not to do BookTube. But if writing books wasn’t the main way I make my living, I might share some of this stuff (some of it) with my friends on social media.
So here’s what I include in my reading journal:
At the start of each month, I start a new page with two lists on it: one for all of the books that I read, and another for the ones that I DNF. Throughout the month, I add books to each list as I read/DNF them. This gives me a great way to look back at the end of the month and see, at a glance, how much progress I made.
For the books I’ve read, I also make a note in the margin if I think the book was good enough to acquire a physical copy. My long-term goal is to build a personal library of all the best books that I’ve read, so this is a way to advance that project.
Also, in the list of books I’ve DNFed, I make a note in the margins if it was a soft DNF and I may consider coming back to it at some point. I believe in DNFing early and often, but I also think that it’s good to occasionally revisit those DNFs and try them again.
If a passage of something I’m reading stands out to me as particularly quoteworthy or memorable, I put a little post-it note on the page so that I can find it later, after I’m done reading for the day (or night). Then, I write it down in my reading journal, with the author, book title, and page number.
I’m not all that particular about collecting quotes, but if I’m really loving a book, pulling out a couple of memorable passages can enrich the reading experience and help me to remember what I’ve read. It’s also fun to share those quotes on my blog and social media, with friends who might not have read the book yet.
One of the main reasons that I want to build a personal library of physical books is so that I can share them with my friends. Of course, it’s easy to lose track of which books I’ve loaned out already, and friends are prone to lose them if you don’t remind them about it from time to time.
So whenever I loan out a book, I make a note in my reading journal of that, including the name of the person I loaned it out to. And when they return it, I make a note of that too.
I don’t really write “reviews” in my reading journal, because it’s a private journal that isn’t meant for public consumption. But I do include a few notes, generally no more than a page, for every book that I read or DNF. This usually includes my thoughts and impressions of the book, what made me DNF it if that was the case, and anything I liked or didn’t like about it.
In addition to those notes, I also give it a 1-5 star rating in the margin, using the following scale:
Of course, it’s all very subjective, but that’s kind of the point. When I want to come back later and see what I thought of a particular book, I can see the star rating and read about what my thoughts and impressions were at the time, which give me a pretty good snapshot. If I decide to reread a book, I do the same thing for the second-read through so that I can judge the two experiences.
If I decide to read a collection or anthology (or magazine issue, for that matter), I first list the title of every story in the book, with room on one side to mark the date that I read it, and on the other side (usually the margin) for what my 1-5 star rating was for that particular story, or whether I skipped or DNFed it.
I don’t bother writing out my thoughts and impressions for every story, but when I’m done with the collection/anthology, I do write down a few notes on it just like any other book.
At this point, my journal is pretty low-key, and it only takes a few minutes to update it whenever I do. However, as I get more into it, I will probably include things like proper journal entries, my thoughts on reading in general, things that I want to see in the genres that I read, and other ruminations like that. The format is really flexible, which is nice, because I’m sure I’ll be adapting it to all sorts of new things in the future.
Taken together, keeping a reading journal like this has really helped me to track my progress, not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of thoughts, impressions, and experiences. And I think that’s the key right there. Instead of each book being its own separate experience, I feel like it’s all a part of a much bigger whole, where each new book is part of a journey. What is the destination of that journey? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s helping me to be a better reader, writer, and person overall.
From TV Tropes:
Half an hour after the show is over, a random viewer is staring into their refrigerator, vaguely bemused by the fact that their six-pack of beer has somehow become a two-pack of beer. Rather than work out how this might have happened, it occurs to them to wonder how in the hell Sydney Bristow went from Hungary to Melbourne, Australia, then to LA, all within 24 hours. Or maybe it occurs to them that they’ve never met anyone who actually named their dog Fido. It didn’t bother them during the show. It wasn’t until they discovered they were running short of beer that it became an issue.
When China Mike Glyer picked up my post a couple of days ago, I was skimming over the comments and saw one that said, in effect, “every book deserves to be read.” At the time, I thought “well, that’s obviously stupid” and moved on, but last evening I had a moment of fridge logic, almost exactly like TV Tropes describes (minus the beer, since I don’t drink).
Every book deserves to be read? Really? Prove it by reading the Bible cover to cover. And the Book of Mormon. And the Doctrine and Covenants / Pearl of Great Price. And the Complete Journal of Discourses. And every General Conference report going back for the last two centuries. Heck, even as a believing Latter-day Saint, I don’t think there’s anyone alive who’s read all of that.
Or how about Mein Kampf? Does that deserve to be read?
(I happen to believe that it does, but in a “he who knows himself and the enemy does not need to fear the outcome of a hundred battles” sort of way. And no, I haven’t read it yet.)
Seriously, though, how insane do you have to be to actually believe something like that? “All books deserve to be read.” That’s not the sort of thing that a person comes up with unless they’ve been programmed to think a certain way. Like, “all women deserve to be believed” (except for Tara Reade, of course).
Now, I don’t believe that there’s a nefarious conspiracy to deliberately program people like this commenter to read crappy books. But there is a lot of propaganda out there that follows the formula “all _____ deserve to be ______.” Case in point, believe all women. What probably happened was this commenter, who has already been programmed by this sort of propaganda, tried to reformulate it in a way that would make me look bad. As in, “Vasicek is such a heartless monster to DNF so many books. All books deserve to be read.”
Here’s the thing, though: books are inanimate objects. They don’t have feelings. They don’t care if you read them or not. But readers do care if a book wastes their time. Time is a scarce resource for all of us, and there are more books in the world than can be read in a thousand lifetimes. So if you want to have any chance of finding and reading the best books, you need to be discerning—and that means acknowledging that some books just aren’t worth your time.
This is why I’m such a firm believer in DNFing books early and often. There’s nothing I hate about reading more than slogging through a book that isn’t working for me, only to find that I should have DNFed it a hundred pages ago. That’s why I was so frustrated with Stranger in a Strange Land. I love many of Heinlein’s other books, especially his juveniles, but some of them really misfire for me. So now, I assume that the author needs to prove themselves with every book.
But Joe, doesn’t it bother you as an author that people are DNFing your books? Not at all! Reading is an act of collaboration between the reader and the writer, which means that everyone’s “best books” list is going to be subjective. Some of the elements that make a book good can be measured objectively, but those elements are going to hit differently for different people—and that’s okay. Besides, even Jesus gets one-star, “did not finish” reviews. Who am I to think that I’m better than Him?
I used to worry that I was DNFing books to easily. But over the course of this last year, I’ve come to trust my own tastes. One of the things that I do test this is to skip to the last chapter of every book that I DNF, and read that. In 9/10 cases, I find that yes, there really is something objectionable about the book, and I made the right choice. And in the 1/10 books where that isn’t the case, something about it usually sticks with me, so that I end up coming back and reading it later. One of those books for me now is Deadhouse Gates, which I am thoroughly enjoying.
But you can’t learn to trust your own tastes if you adopt this insane idea that “every book deserves to be read.” In fact, if I still believed that I needed to finish every book that I started, I probably wouldn’t be much of a reader right now, just like most Americans.
So no, not every book deserves to be read. And at the end of the day, it isn’t about the books at all: it’s about the readers.
My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.
In 2007, when I was a sophomore in college, I went up to Salt Lake City with some friends and was browsing the awesome (and fairly run down, even at the time) used bookstore near the Gallivan Plaza TRAX stop, which has since changed names and moved to another location. It was a really awesome used bookstore, and I determined to buy a SF novel while I was there, since I was really getting back into SF after my mission. I saw a massive 600+ page trade paperback edition of Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, and since I was reading Downbelow Station at the time, I decided to get that one.
For the next fifteen years, I lugged that book everywhere, through more than a dozen moves (though for the biggest move, where I made the pioneer trek in the wrong direction and repented 8 months later, I boxed it up with my other books and left it in a friend’s basement). In all that time, I never actually read it—or even opened it up, really—but it was always there, somewhere in the middle of my dismally long TBR list.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it: I just didn’t have (or make) the time. Downbelow Station had been an okay read, if not spectacular, but I had really enjoyed some of C.J. Cherryh’s shorter books, like Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night. Also, space opera books about sprawling galactic empires were right up my wheelhouse, so it didn’t seem odd for me to own such a book that I hadn’t yet read. In fact, most of the books that I owned throughout this time were books that I wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to yet. If I have a superpower, it’s an uncanny ability to acquire books no matter where I am. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at reading them.
Fast forward to 2022. I’ve gotten married, had a daughter, launched my own writing career, and become a homeowner—and I’m still lugging this massive 600+ page trade paperback book that I’ve never read. But I’ve just set a resolution to read (or DNF) every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, and Cyteen is on the list. So around the middle of March, I finally open it up and start reading it.
After about a month, I decided to DNF it.
It’s not that it was terrible. Perhaps you enjoyed it, and that’s fine. I just found it to be too drawn out and confusing. I think C.J. Cherryh does better when she’s focusing on just a few characters, rather than trying to give the grand sweep of galactic civilization or whatever. I didn’t finish Foreigner for similar reasons. Maybe someday I’ll return to that one and Cyteen, but for now, I’m counting it as a DNF.
But the thing is, I was hauling around this massive book for most of my adult life. When I bought it in 2007, I figured that since it had won a Hugo, it had to be good. Perhaps, if I’d read it back then, I would have been more patient with it and slogged through to the end. Perhaps I would have decided it was just as good as Downbelow Station. Or perhaps, if I read Downbelow Station today, I would end up DNFing it as well.
The point is, I wish I’d been a lot more discerning about my reading when I was younger, and not just acquired books that I hoped to read “someday”… because books (at least the paper ones) are heavy and take up a lot of space. And a lot of them really aren’t worth reading. Of course, you’ve got to read a few stinkers to figure out what you really like, so it isn’t always a waste… but libraries exist for a reason.
So what this experience really tells me is that Mrs. Vasicek and I are doing the right thing by taking our family to our local library once a week. Also, it tells me that the second part of my resolution—to actually acquire all of the books that I think were worth reading—is just as important as actually reading them. Because, if the ultimate goal is to “seek… out of the best books words of wisdom,” then it’s not enough to just make a list: you actually have to read the damned things, and keep your own personal library in order to revisit those words and share them with others. Because ultimately, you have to discover which books are the “best books” on your own, and your best books list isn’t going to be the same as anyone else’s best books list. Which means that you can’t rely on anyone else’s list. You can use it as a starting point to make your own list, but that’s all you should use it for.
So now I want to go through all of the books I’ve acquired over the years and figure out which ones I ought to get rid of, because Cyteen certainly wasn’t the only one. In fact, most of the books in our family library are books that I haven’t (yet) read. By my count, there are just under 150 of them, totalling about 55k words. Even at a rate of 100 words or two hours of reading each day, that’s still going to take almost two years… and that’s not counting all the library books that we’re sure to check out in the meantime.
Oh well. I suppose this is more of a process than anything else. Journey before destination, and all that. And I’m sure I’ll have fun in the process, since despite the fact that I DNF far more books than I actually read, I do genuinely enjoy reading.
In any case, here are all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books that I read (or DNFed) in the month of April:
Total books remaining: 26 out of 110 (currently reading 12 and listening to 3).
This author’s note originally appeared in the November 7th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.
One of the things I’ve come to really love about married life is reading in bed with Mrs. Vasicek. Right now, I’m finishing House of Assassins by Larry Correia, and she’s reading the Westmark Trilogy by Lloyd Alexander. She just finished the mystery novel A Better Man (making a few jokes about the title), and I just finished Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which has revived my perennial fascination with the Mongols.
It’s great to share a book with someone you love, but it’s also great to share the same space as the person you love while totally immersed in a book. Those are two different things. I’m also rediscovering how refreshing it is to end a long day by unwinding with a good book for an hour or two.
Reading stands apart from other leisure activities. Whenever I spend too much time on YouTube, or playing computer games, or doing something else involving the internet and a screen, I always come away feeling drained. Not so with reading. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.
Reading a good book always leaves me feeling replenished, like I’ve just come back from an exciting adventure, or come to the end of a perfect day. The books that stick with me always seem to have changed me in some way, even if it’s so subtle that I can’t tell how.
Unlike watching TV or YouTube, reading takes work. It isn’t laborious, but the act of reading requires just enough effort that when I’m tired or worn out, screens and the internet usually win out. But when I make the conscious decision to turn away from those things and open up a book instead, I never regret it. The same can’t be said when I come to the end of a YouTube binge.
It’s never too late to start a new habit or set a new resolution, but there’s something about getting married that makes it easier. So in an effort to read more (and finally get to all the books that I’ve accumulated over the last few years), I’m setting a goal to read two books a week. That’s 100 books over the course of a year, with a bit of allowance for unforeseen interruptions.
A hundred books sounds like a lot, but as a writer, it’s probably on the low end of what I should be reading anyway. Hopefully the quality of my writing improves as I do it. If I get into the habit now, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to make and keep that resolution for 2020.
What are some of the ways that you enjoy reading? With a spouse? With a pet? Alone? In a warm and quiet place? With a beverage of something tasty? Or maybe in a crowded place, with lots of opportunities for people watching?
I suppose there are just as many ways to read as there are ways to write, which is to say that there’s one for every reader. May you be fortunate enough to spend lots of time with yours!
This author’s note originally appeared in the October 24th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.
There’s this guy I follow on YouTube named Tom Luongo who has a very interesting take on Star Wars: The Last Jedi. According to him, it’s one of the best Star Wars films ever made. I recently got into an online conversation with him about it, so I thought it would be interesting to bring up some of that in this newsletter.
Tom is a radical anarcho-capitalist libertarian who lives on a farm in Florida that he and his wife built. I listen to his political commentary mainly for the contrast. He’s a natural contrarian who tends to fall into the trap of wishcasting, which has really blackpilled him in the last few years. I disagree with him almost all of the time, but he’s got a fascinating take on things, and I think his central thesis is basically correct.
You really should read or listen to Tom’s take on The Last Jedi. His argument goes something like this: the Skywalker-Solo family was always bound to come to a tragic end because the original series never resolved any of their underlying flaws, so in order for anything good to come of the family’s fall, everything built up by the previous generation first needs to come crashing down. Unfortunately, The Last Jedi falls in the midpoint of that arc, when the characters hit their lowest point, which is why so many fans were disappointed with it—just like so many fans of A New Hope were disappointed by The Empire Strikes Back the first time they watched it.
If nothing else, his argument has convinced me to watch The Rise of Skywalker, which I wasn’t planning to do. In fact, after The Last Jedi, I had pretty much checked out of the Star Wars fandom forever.
I discovered Star Wars when I was seven years old and saw A New Hope for the first time. Completely blew me away. My parents made me wait a year and a half to watch Empire Strikes Back, and for the last couple of months I was counting down the days. When I first saw Empire, I was lukewarm on it, but I really liked the Battle of Hoth and Luke’s duel with Vader (strangely, I don’t remember being surprised to learn that Vader was Luke’s father). In later rewatchings, it grew to be not only my favorite Star Wars movie, but my favorite movie of all time. I also loved Return of the Jedi, and felt that it really sticked the landing for the trilogy.
I read all the Star Wars books from the library that I could get my hands on. Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson—but it was Roger Allen McBride’s Corellia Trilogy that really opened my eyes to a different kind of science fiction. Instead of all the flashy lasers and adventurous antics, he used the limitations of physics to depict a universe far more vast and far more ancient than my young, boyish mind had ever dared imagine. I began to branch out to other works of science fiction, and over the next few years I discovered Card, Le Guin, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Burroughs, and all the other greats.
When Phantom Menace came out, it was a huge disappointment. Midichloriens? Jar Jar Binx… ugh. Darth Maul was pretty okay, but the rest of the movie was garbage. But I held out hope that Clone Wars would be better… and it wasn’t. Too much CGI, too little story. The romance was icky, the plot was too slow, and the fight scene with Yoda was a farcical caricature. I was disgusted, but I still saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters, because surely they had to get Vader right… and once again, they failed. Massive disappointment. It was like Lukas had taken a massive dump on my childhood, and was trying to sell it back to me as merchandise.
I cooled off to Star Wars for the next few years. It was never a religion to me. I dabbled a bit with the video games and expanded universe novels, but at this point in my life, I was more of a casual fan. I turned to other works of science fiction and fantasy, and began to pursue my own writing more seriously.
Ever since 4th grade, I always knew I would be a writer. All through high school I had some novel project or another I was working on, but it wasn’t until college that I finished any of them. In 2008, I took Brandon Sanderson’s writing class at BYU and finished my first novel. Incidentally, my wife was in the same class, though it would be another ten years before we met each other.
When The Force Awakens came out, my expectations were low. I didn’t want to get shafted like I had by the prequels. It was probably because of those low expectations that I enjoyed it. Han Solo’s character was utterly ruined, and the plot was little more than a rip-off of A New Hope, but hey, at least it didn’t totally suck! Then Rogue One came out, and it was excellent. On par with the original trilogy. Star Wars was back.
And then, The Last Jedi… green alien breastmilk… Leia Poppins… Admiral Gender Studies… Space Vegas…
Ironically, I think I would have hated it less if Rogue One hadn’t been so good. By the time TLJ came out, I felt like I was on a rollercoaster that was giving me a really bad case of whiplash, and I just wanted it to end. The low points felt so low because the high points were so high, and with TLJ it felt like it was all crashing down again.
At that point, I noped out. No more Star Wars. I was out. The fact that so much of my childhood—and not only that, but my chosen career—was so tied up in the franchise only made it that much more painful.
And then I heard Tom Luongo’s take on The Last Jedi, which has made me rethink some things. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a great film, but perhaps it’s not as flawed as I thought it was. It really does come down to The Rise of Skywalker. Will it bring the roller-coaster ride to a satisfying conclusion, or will it fling us off the rails the way the prequels did? (“nooooooooooooo!”) I guess we’ll find out in December.