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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Goth Chick News: Please Do Not Talk About the Contents of This Post…

Goth Chick News: Please Do Not Talk About the Contents of This Post…

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If you’re wondering why I’m giving this whole thing any additional oxygen, that makes two of us. But sometimes the universe deals up such general absurdity that I can’t let it pass.

Case in point, the latest buzz-generating horror flick, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

First, I need to point out (if it wasn’t obvious) that the said buzz isn’t good; though Hollywood has always maintained all publicity is good publicity. In general, even hardcore horror types are expressing outrage that director Fyse Frake-Waterfield has crossed the line. If you didn’t see my original write up on this gem back in November, let me get you caught up.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai with a Twist

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai with a Twist

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Samurai Spy (Japan, 1965)

By the 1960s, the tropes of chambara films, i.e., samurai adventures, had become through endless repetition standardized and over-familiar. As with the Western film in America and Europe, it was time for variations on the theme less they lose their audience, and so antiheroes raised their unfeeling heads and genre crossovers appeared, such as the samurai-meet-kaiju Daimajin movies. This week we take a look at a couple of interesting antihero adventures plus a crossover with the then-popular secret agent genre, Samurai Spy. Let’s dive in!

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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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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Hercule Poirot visits Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Hercule Poirot visits Nero Wolfe

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Been writing and reading a lot of Nero Wolfe lately (when I’m not re-watching Columbo before bed).

Just to channel Archie, I like to have favorite detectives visit Wolfe’s office. For some fun, I’m well over 5,000 words into a story with Groucho (Rufus Flywheel) and Chico on a case with Archie (and Wolfe) at The Big Store. I’ve tinkered with Dirk Gently (my favorite Douglas Adams character) using Zen navigation and Archie confronting him in front of the Brownstone.

I have toyed with a solo Poirot adventure, based on a non-Poirot story written by Agatha Christie. My Poirot is very much David Suchet’s portrayal, and it’s fun to write.

So, I had Poirot visit the Brownstone. I may add a scene during lunch, with them talking about another subject; the conversation mildly annoying Archie. That could be fun.

The fussy little Belgian was so far forward in the red chair that it barely qualified as sitting. His back was perfectly straight, and there couldn’t have been a centimeter of space between his shoes. I had never seen a man take off a pair of gloves so deliberately. I don’t know how he could possibly be comfortable, but he didn’t seem to be bothered at all. It’s as if that were the only natural way to sit. And I’m telling you, it definitely wasn’t natural.

I had received a call three weeks before from a Captain Arthur Hastings, in London. Wolfe had used a competent operative named Ethelbert Hitchcock over there. And I’m not making that first name up. I started calling him Geoffrey to keep from laughing as I typed these little accounts. I don’t think he’d mind too much.

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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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If, December 1957, A Retro-Review

If, December 1957, A Retro-Review

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IF, December 1957. Cover by Mel Hunter

If was a classic digest magazine of what might be called the “second tier” of SF magazines. (The term second tier might be a bit dismissive — there were a number of quality magazines that for a time surpassed one or more of the so-called “Big Three” (Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF.) That said, those three magazines, via comparative longevity, consistent quality, and simply tradition were considered “the big three” by the SF community for most of the ’50s through ’70s.) It was founded by James Quinn (Quinn Publishing Company) in 1952, with Paul Fairman the initial editor. Quinn took over from Fairman fairly soon (though Larry Shaw was listed as Associate Editor but was apparently the actual editor from May 1953 to March 1954), and he edited it until 1958, after which Damon Knight briefly took over. Quinn sold the magazines to the publishers of Galaxy, and it was a companion to Galaxy for the rest of its existence; under the editorship, sequentially, of H. L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, Ejler Jakobsson, and Jim Baen, before folding after the November-December 1974 issue.

There was a single-issue revival in 1986, edited by Clifford Hong, officially called Worlds of If. Though that revival quickly failed, it should be said that the list of contributors is fairly impressive (Niven, Van Vogt, Salmonson, Schenck, Card, Zelazny, etc.) As far as I know the official title of the magazine (except for the last issue) was always If, sometimes subtitled “Worlds of Science Fiction,” but the cover, especially late in the run, often appeared to give the title Worlds of If. During Pohl’s editorship, when it was positioned as the somewhat lighter, more adventure-oriented, magazine in the Galaxy stable, it won three consecutive Hugos as best magazine, supposedly to Pohl’s slight dismay, as he considered Galaxy the better product.

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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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Goth Chick News: Constantine 2 is Finally (Almost) a Reality

Goth Chick News: Constantine 2 is Finally (Almost) a Reality

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Cover of Hellblazer #1 (January, 1988.). Art by Dave McKean

Everyone has a couple. You know, the movie or movies that serve as your mental comfort food. In the same way that you might long for Mac and Cheese or a PB&J when the world gets on your nerves, I bet you have movies you rewatch for the same reason. When asked, some of my day-job coworkers mentioned When Harry Met Sally, the original Star Wars, and Anchorman as films they put on to lift their spirits.

As you could probably guess, my go-to movies are slightly left of center. My top three in no particular order are Jaws (1975), the first Blade (1998) movie and Constantine (2005). I haven’t looked too closely as to why these stories provide me such a soothing mental distraction, or even what they have in common. But thankfully they are all streaming because I damaged more than one DVD of each taking them with me when I used to travel long stretches for work. I mean, nothing says “sweet home Chicago” like Bruce the shark.

Whereas both Jaws and Blade had more than one sequel, such as they were, Constantine did not. Based on a DC Comics character who first appeared in his own comic Hellblazer in 1988, John Constantine would go on to star in 300 issues, earning him third place in Empire’s 50 Greatest Comic Characters of All Time. So, it was not for lack of source material that we haven’t seen Keanu Reeves reprising his rendition of the cynical, chain-smoking occult detective, until now.

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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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