Tumbles From The Bitface

Let’s discuss the famous, poster-worthy, famous scene. Clearly if you believe someone is a government agent about to bust your soviet spy ring, you have to assassinate them. And what better way to do that than trick them into catching a bus to a bus stop on the open prairie, miles from anywhere; and then chase them with a crop-spraying plane and try to shoot them from it?

Many better ways. Many, many better ways.

I didn’t realise Hitchcock was making a farce. Well, maybe that’s unfair. It’s a kind-of spy story, it’s kind of a romance, it’s pretty funny in places. In fact, its main flaw may be that it doesn’t really know what it wants to be. And that it spells things out too much. We, the viewer, can work some things out: have a little more respect for us, Alfred.

It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.

While Dawkins seems to have fallen completely into a vat of kool-aid:

I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!”

Interesting to hear he’s writing a novel, and the whole text of his piece (archive.is link) is interesting. I don’t really think he’s lost his mind. But he would know, I’m sure, that a computer model of the climate, say, is not the actual climate. Similarly a large language model of an intelligence is not an intelligence in any sense we would normally use the term.

Keep the Giraffe Burning is a collection of Sladek’s short stories, published in 1977 (so nearly 50 hears ago, which is going to take some getting used to). I don’t know when I started reading it, but don’t think it was this year. No matter, though, I finished it the other day, and that’s all that matters for counting it as one of this year’s books.

It’s a strange one. I remember hearing of Sladek as being one of the few writers who successfully mixed SF with humour. I read two or three novels by him, so long ago that I remember basically nothing about them, but I don’t recall them being particularly funny.

I’m not sure where I heard of this. It’s on a list of possible books to read I’ve had knocking around for a few years. I thought it originally came from one of those lists in The Guardian, ‘Books to Read This Summer’, or similar. But I can’t find any reference to it on the site now.

And it would be kind of strange to read about this in The Guardian, because it’s not very professional.

The problem is, it feels like it needs a major editing pass. It’s kind of disjointed. There are inconsistencies of tone, and confusion (in the reader) about how much time has passed. After what feels like quite a short time in the main character’s experiences, we learn five years have passed, for example.

The idea is good, and it does succeed in being a page turner. It wound the tension very high, especially at one point. It’s about time-travelling historians. An academic institute where they do historical research by time travel.

Which is a fine idea, but surely the first question anyone asks when they discover time travel is possible is, ‘To the future?’ So if you’re not going to travel forward you need some mechanism or rule as to why that’s not possible. Our characters here don’t even think about the future. Except (spoiler ahead) when one character reveals he’s from the future.

Later on there’s a mission to Mars planned, but that has nothing to do with our characters, except when one threatens to leave and join the space programme. Other than that we hear nothing of the world outside St Mary’s, the research institute that gives this series (because of course) its title.

It turns out it began as a self-published novel, and was successful enough that the series was picked up by a mainstream publishing house, which is the dream. From reviews and comments on GoodReads and elsewhere I hear the writing gets better in the later books. I suspect that is at least partly because of professional editors. Still, we learn our craft and hopefully improve oner time, whatever we do.

I feel that title should have a comma.

I heard Jay McInerney interview on The Booking Club podcast , and it intrigued me enough to make me want to read this. Then, as I suggested a couple of days ago, I wondered why I hadn’t read it years ago..

The second-person, present-tense viewpoint quickly becomes transparent, and is never annoying.

It’s a cocaine-fuelled fever dream. Over a few days and 150 or so pages our unnamed (I think) protagonist loses his job through general fucked-up-ness, tells us the story of how his wife left his wife left him, and of the death of his mother. Which seems to be main trigger for his fall. This is a telling quote:

You kept waiting for the onset of grief.You are beginning to suspect it arrive nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda’s departure.