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Author: John ONeill

Flood of AI-Written Fiction Shuts Down Clarkesworld Submissions

Flood of AI-Written Fiction Shuts Down Clarkesworld Submissions

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Recent issues of Clarkesworld magazine, edited by Neil Clarke

If you’re active on social media, or if you follow the major science fiction magazines, you’ve probably seen the headlines. It’s not every day that Neil Clarke, Sheila Williams, and Sheree Renée Thomas (editors of Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, respectively) are quoted extensively in The New York Times. But that’s exactly what happened on Thursday.

It started with Neil, who reported on Twitter earlier this week that a sudden flood of AI-generated submissions, likely triggered by get-rich-quick schemes “making claims of easy money with ChatGPT,” had caused him to temporarily close submissions to Clarkesworld. (ChatGPT is the most popular of the new crop of chatbots capable of rapidly creating long-form text based on short prompts from users.)

As you can imagine, the news that a leading science fiction magazine had to close submissions because it was overwhelmed with AI-generated subs captured enormous attention, and that tweet garnered over 8 million views and, within a matter of days, national attention from press outlets like The Guardian and NYT.

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Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
(Harper Voyager, February 28, 2023). Cover by Ivan Belikov

I met Shannon Chakraborty at the 2018 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, where she conducted a delightful reading from her second novel The Kingdom of Copper, the sequel to her bestselling debut The City of Brass. Back then she went by the very cool name “S. A Chakraborty.” For her new book The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, she has changed her name slightly to “Shannon Chakraborty,” which is much easier to shout at somebody when you’re trying to get them to hold an elevator.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi will be published by Harper Voyager next week, and I’m going to go on record here as recommending you clear the end of the month for this one. Publishers Weekly calls it a swashbuckling adventure with “playful plot twists and thrilling action sequences [with a] charmingly crooked cast and dry humor,” and BookPage sums it up as “A swashbuckling high seas quest that’s rousing, profound and irresistible.” This sounds like the book I need.

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Vintage Treasures: The Plenty Trilogy by Colin Greenland

Vintage Treasures: The Plenty Trilogy by Colin Greenland

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Take Back Plenty, Seasons of Plenty, and Mother of Plenty (AvoNova, January 1992 and
January 1996, and Avon Eos, June 1998). Covers by Glenn Orbik, Jim Burns, and uncredited

Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty was one of the major British SF novels of the 90s. It won the British Science Fiction Award and the Clarke Award for Best SF Novel, and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Writing about its heroine, Tabitha Jute, in Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute said:

Colin Greenland, one of the sharpest and most innovative young British critics and novelists, had a bright idea. The old SF was joyous. So why not enjoy it, even now? Why not write Space Opera whose heroine – Tabitha Jute – may not change the universe, but who is superabundantly alive? So he did.

Greenland followed Take Back Plenty with two sequels, Seasons of Plenty, and Mother of Plenty, and one collection, The Plenty Principle, which included a prequel tale using the same setting, a derelict planet-sized starship “populated by gamblers, militarists, and space trash” known as Plenty.

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Repackaging a Classic: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

Repackaging a Classic: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

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Cinder, Volume One of The Lunar Chronicles (Square Fish, February 2020). Cover by Tomer Hanuka

I don’t usually hang out in the young adult section at Barnes & Noble. OK, that’s a blatant lie. I gawk at the colorful table displays like a starving zombie at a Springsteen concert. Let me start over.

I love the young adult section at Barnes & Noble, but I don’t usually buy a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I don’t often come across book descriptions like this one.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move…. Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction.

A Cinderella retelling dressed up as cyberpunk noir, described as “a cross between Cinderella, Terminator, and Star Wars” by Entertainment Weekly? That’s worth twelve bucks. I totally missed Marissa Meyer’s Cinder when it was released in hardcover a decade ago, but I was delighted to bring the new paperback edition home with me, and you know what? I’m glad I did.

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New Treasures: The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

New Treasures: The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

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The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot, July 2022). Cover design by Alice Claire Coleman

I’m a little late out of the gate with this one. The Last Blade Priest came out last summer and I ignored it, despite the warm reviews from most of the usual sources (GrimDark Magazine called it “a brilliant epic… one of my favorite new releases of this year,” and Publishers Weekly said it’s “gripping… demonstrates the value of thoughtful, well-planned worldbuilding.”)

But it wasn’t until I stumbled across Ian Mond’s review at Locus Online last fall (“The Last Blade Priest… unashamedly embraces the tropes of epic fan­tasy – the political shenanigans, complex magic systems, and ancient, enigmatic Gods – that make the genre so much fun to read”) that my interest was finally piqued, and I bought a copy.

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Vintage Treasures: Space Opera and Space Odysseys edited by Brian Aldiss

Vintage Treasures: Space Opera and Space Odysseys edited by Brian Aldiss

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Space Opera and Space Odysseys (Futura, July and December 1974). Covers by Eddie Jones

Brian Aldiss had a long and enviable career at the top of the science fiction field, with dozens of novels to his credit, and nearly three dozen collections.

But in his long career he also produced some excellent anthologies. In partnership with Harry Harrison he released nine annual volumes of Best SF (1967-1975), three retrospective titles looking at SF of the 1940s to the 1960s (Decade: The 1940s and its sequels), and fine standalone titles such as The Astounding-Analog Reader and Farewell Fantastic Venus! But on his own he also assembled several terrific volumes, including a few we’ve looked at in the past, including Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two and Perilous Planets.

Today I want to examine two wonderful paperback anthologies he released in 1974 with Futura in the UK (and later reprinted in the US in incomplete editions): Space Opera and Space Odysseys, which contain stories by Robert Sheckley, Donald Wandrei, Daniel F. Galouye, Edmond Hamilton, James E. Gunn, Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, A. E. van Vogt, Charles Harness, Randall Garrett, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Edward E. Smith, Alfred Bester, Frank Belknap Long, James Tiptree, Jr. Ross Rocklynne, F. M. Busby, Poul Anderson, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and many others.

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400 pages of the Best of the Modern Weird: Weird Fiction Review #12 from Centipede Press

400 pages of the Best of the Modern Weird: Weird Fiction Review #12 from Centipede Press

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Weird Fiction Review #12 (Centipede Press, October 2022). Front and back covers by Stephen Fabian

Weird Fiction Review, edited by John Pelan and published annually by Centipede Press, has gradually established itself as the premier magazine of modern dark fantasy. It’s published a dozen issues so far and has included fiction by Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Victor LaValle, Stephen Graham Jones, Marc Laidlaw, Joseph S. Pulver, Brian Stableford, Darrell Schweitzer, John Shirley, and many, many more.

But I think the reason I love this mag — aside from its incredible production values and huge size (issues typically run around 400 pages) — is the excellent non-fiction. It brings genuine scholarship to fascinating topics, with lengthy and entertaining articles on things like a history of the legendary Gnome Press by Stefan Dziemianowicz, a brief history of Mexican Horror Comic Books by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a survey of The Horror Pulps 1933-1940 by Robert Weinberg, an essay on EC Comics by E. B. Boatner, Collecting Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa by Ron Clinton, 90 Years of Amazing Stories by Joseph Wrzos, and a regular column on Forgotten Masters of the Weird Tale by editor John Pelan that has covered Nictzin Dyalhis, Paul Ernst, Arthur Leo Zagat, Sax Rohmer, C. Hall Thompson, Walter Owen, Edmund Snell, and Wyatt Blassingame.

The latest issue features fiction by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Victor LaValle, Stephen Graham Jones, Scott Bradfield and others, plus a full-color Stephen Fabian Art Gallery, an appreciation of the film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death by John Llewellyn Probert, an interview with Weirdbook publisher W. Paul Ganley by Darrell Schweitzer, an article on William F. Nolan by Jason V. Brock, an interview with Graham Masterton by Dave Roberts — and a celebration of the life and work of Weird Fiction Review’s editor John Pelan, who tragically past away on April 11, 2021.

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The Spoils of Capricon: Rooks and Ruin by Melissa Caruso

The Spoils of Capricon: Rooks and Ruin by Melissa Caruso

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The Rooks and Ruin trilogy: The Obsidian Tower, The Quicksilver Court, and The Ivory Tomb
(Orbit, 2020, 2021, and 2022). Covers by Peter Bollinger, Mike Heath, and Peter Bollinger

On Saturday I was wandering through the well-stocked Dealer’s Room at Capricon 43 in Chicago with Rich Horton, looking for new books of all kinds. (And if there’s a guy you want at your side as you struggle to find quality books, believe me, it’s Rich Horton. He has great taste and a well informed opinion on everything — and I do mean everything.) I stumbled on the newly-released The Ivory Tomb, the concluding novel in Melissa Caruso’s Rooks and Ruin, and read the first paragraph of the back cover.

The Dark Days have returned. The Demon of Carnage mercilessly cuts through villagers and armies. The Demon of Corruption rots the land. The Serene Empire and the Witch Lords race towards war. And in the middle of it all stands Rxyander, the Warden of Gloamingard.

That’s a lot of demons. Do I really want to read a trilogy about Dark Days, demons, Witch Lords, and a gloom-shrouded castle called ‘Gloamingard’??

Ha! You know me so well. Of course I do. I bought that book so fast Rich didn’t even know what happened.

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Vintage Treasures: The Bantam John Crowley

Vintage Treasures: The Bantam John Crowley

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Four John Crowley paperbacks published in rapid succession by Bantam: Little, Big, Beasts,
Engine Summer, The Deep (October, November, December 1983, and January 1984). Covers by Yvonne Gilbert

In 1981 Bantam Books published John Crowley’s masterwork Little, Big, which Matthew David Surridge calls “the best post-Tolkien novel of the fantastic.” It was an unexpected hit, receiving nominations for every major fantasy prize, including the Hugo, Balrog, BSFA, Locus, and Nebula awards, and winning both the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Six years later, when Locus surveyed its readers on the All-Time Best Fantasy Novel, it placed 10th. When Locus repeated the poll eleven years later, it moved up two slots into 8th place.

It’s fair to say the book’s popularity took its publisher by surprise. Bantam Books hadn’t bothered with a hardcover release — or cover art — for Little, Big; instead they published it in a nondescript trade paperback edition and snuck the book into stores under the cover of night in September 1981. They hadn’t even planned a mass market edition. It was rave reviews and word of mouth that did the rest.

Bantam made up for it two years later, after the thunderous accolades for the book made the magnitude of their mistake obvious. They released Little, Big in a handsome paperback edition in October 1983 (two years and one month after the the trade edition) with a fine cover by Yvonne Gilbert, and in rapid-fire sequence they re-released Crowley’s entire back catalog, one novel every month: Beasts, Engine Summer, and The Deep, all with covers by Gilbert. It was the first time Crowley had ever been given any real attention by a publisher, and it helped thousands of new readers discover him for the first time.

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New Treasures: Worlds Long Lost edited by Christopher Ruocchio and Sean CW Korsgaard

New Treasures: Worlds Long Lost edited by Christopher Ruocchio and Sean CW Korsgaard

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Worlds Long Lost (Baen Books, December 6, 2022). Cover by Bob Eggleton

Baen Books has published some terrific anthologies recently.

Christopher Ruocchio (The Sun Eater series) has had a particularly fine run, with over half a dozen to his credit, most with Baen senior editor Hank Davis — including Space Pioneers, Cosmic Corsairs, and Time Troopers — or Tony Daniel (Star Destroyers and World Breakers). Which is why I was dismayed to learn that Worlds Long Lost, a collection of all-new stories of ancient alien artifacts, is his last. Here’s the announcement on his blog, SollanEmpire.com

Worlds Long Lost is my final short story anthology with Baen Books, co-edited with my successor, Sean C.W. Korsgaard. Featuring stories of ancient aliens and their ruins, it includes my short story “Mother of Monsters.” “Mother of Monsters” is set on the Cielcin worldship codenamed Echidna, the very moon captured by Lord Cassian Powers at the Second Battle of Cressgard. It is the tale of Tor Mencius, the scholiast in charge of excavating the tombs of the Aetane who ruled Echidna…and of what he discovered there.

Christopher’s story is a brand new tale set in his popular Sun Eater series. The book also contains original fiction from Orson Scott Card, Adam Oyebanji, M.A. Rothman and D.J. Butler, Les Johnson, and many more.

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