This is the part where I tell the computer, “ENHANCE.”
Let’s be clear, I don’t know these people, I don’t use them. One assumes the other authors in that batch (Charlie Jane Anders, Alix Harrow, Sarah Gailey, Marlon James, Kameron Hurley, Annalee Newitz, and others) also are not affiliated with them in any way.
They seem to have multiple websites and landing pages, all of which promise the standard panoply of BESTSELLER STATUS AND FANCY AGENTS AND OH THE SIGHTS WE CAN SHOW YOU. One assumes it’s all a hot cup of horseshit. But then again, maybe we only need to ask the writers in one of their testimonials, Ryan Heath —
Thrilled with the what? The service? The hold music? The canapes? The nipple-ticklings? Well, whatever. I’m sure it’s good. Thanks, Ryan Heath, for your thoughts. Let’s listen to another very real author, Joy Shawn —
In the hands of professionals who what? Anyway, I’m sure he just fell asleep in the middle of the testimonial, this very real person named Joy Shawn. I found it to be a much needed perspective from WELL HOLD ON AND WAIT A GOSH DARN MINUTE
RYAN HEATH, OR SHOULD I CALL YOU, JOY SHAWN
*thunder crashes*
Well let’s just do a little reverse image search here annnnnd
They’re giving scam vibes. Avoid. Report. Or go use their chat function to mess with them, if you’re so inclined.
Needless to say, this sort of thing is never necessary for a writer, even if it were legit, which it’s almost certainly not. They make big promises and offer dubious evidence of delivery. Be safe, be smart, be wary, and definitely scrutinize stuff like this with the world’s biggest magnifying glass. This one is easy to see for its steaming fractures.
If you ever see anything affiliating itself with me or my books, and you wanna ask if it’s real, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
Bye.
(Thanks to Gabino Iglesias for pointing this out.)
And now, a guest post from certified cool dude, Kevin Hearne:
Okay: Whew. Here in September, things are looking a bit more hopeful. But back in January, I was worried about ruining my shorts because it seemed we were all trapped on a fascist roller coaster and were about to top out and begin our rapid descent into terror. Rights were (and are) being stripped away by right-wing state legislatures and courts, and I found myself looking to escape into stories where fascists were defeated. And I discovered something curious: There were (and are) plenty of anti-authoritarian stories, but not as many explicitly antifascist ones. Why? Maybe because fascists are huge dicks. They attack and keep on attacking because of that thing I just mentioned where they’re huge dicks. (Sorry, should have warned you the circular argument would swing around and hit hard.) History teaches us that appeasement doesn’t work. Neither does negotiation, because you can’t negotiate with folks whose starting position is that large swathes of humanity don’t deserve human rights. Exactly two things work: 1) you make fun of them or 2) all that stuff the Allies did in Europe in WWII.
Thankfully, the Harris/Walz campaign is doing a great job of option 1. And no one wants option 2. But as a stress relief valve—to get me through the election—I wanted to read fiction where fascists got the heckin’ heck kicked out of them. To make sure that happened, I started a little imprint called Horned Lark Press, then reached out to an author who wrote the last explicitly antifascist fiction I read: Lilith Saintcrow. Her novel Afterwar scratched that itch years ago when I read it, and I asked if she would like to write some fascist-stomping sci-fi pulp fiction.
Friends, she did.
And when, months later, I finally got to revel in its profane, violent bloodbath—a story about a border runner who darts into fascist territory in a fractured North America to save someone and incidentally get a bit of revenge—I knew I’d need some pulptastic cover art. I found Phineas X. Jones, who was a delight to work with, and he crafted character sketches to make sure Lilith was happy before crafting the final composition.
So here is the cover for COYOTE RUN—but let me preface it by saying the quoted blurb at the top is entirely fake, and the final cover will have a real blurb from someone whose name isn’t Pisstaker. It’s there because we have to make fun of fascists. So please enjoy this Limited Edition Couchfucker Cover.
You may notice the badge at the top left that says Amazing Tales of Antifascist Action! Vol. 1. That’s because I dearly hope we get to have many more volumes written by various authors—either fantasy or science fiction—with the same pulpy vibe. And, of course, I’d like to read more adventures featuring Coyote and Marge—those are the women on the cover kicking ass. Here’s the official summary:
In the first Amazing Tale of Antifascist Action, New York Times bestselling author Lilith Saintcrow serves up science fiction pulp in a North America fractured by drones, bioweapons, and ideology, giving us a heroine practically made out of violent resistance.
THE RUNNER
Just behind the front lines of a war they call “civil,” the shifter called Coyote is tough, fast, ugly—and known for taking jobs nobody else will.
THE JOB
Marge’s sister is locked in a prison camp civilians shouldn’t know about, deep in enemy territory. Rescuing her will take a plan made of weapons-grade insanity.
THE TRICK
To get in, all Coyote has to do is get caught.
THE PAYOFF
None, unless the satisfaction of killing an old enemy counts. And maybe a few small bounties from murdering fascist clones…
RUN, COYOTE. RUN.
Eh? Come on! It’s a deeply satisfying and bloody tale. You want it. You need it. You’ll feel better. And real people, not A.I. techbros, will get paid, because Horned Lark Press will never, ever use A.I. for anything. (Aside from its baked-in plagiarism and the immense environmental damage it’s causing, the people behind A.I. are absolutely backing the fascists in this upcoming election.)
When you preorder COYOTE RUN directly from Horned Lark Press, you’ll get three bucks off the cover price, a bookmark from us, a couple of antifascist stickers, and a postcard featuring the Couchfucker Cover suitable for your office, refrigerator, or mailing to the uncle you argue with at Thanksgiving. It’s a smokin’ hot deal. Preorders from other vendors (and in other formats like ebook and audio) will be coming soon.
Buying direct from Horned Lark will help a small press grow and acquire more stories, of course. While we’re starting out with antifascist action, we plan to publish all kinds of spiffy stuff—just not military sci-fi or copaganda.
If you happen to be a published author who’d like to take a look at an advance copy of COYOTE RUN for possible blurbage—we need to replace that couchfucker quote, after all—hit me up using info@hornedlarkpress.com. Likewise, if you’re an established author who might be interested in writing a novella for the Amazing Tales of Antifascist Action! series (or anything else), please holler.
We’ll be opening up to general submissions in the spring.
Thanks so much for reading, y’all. And for voting.
One of the occasional defenses of generative AI is that it quote-unquote ‘democratizes’ art and writing — and then, as with the NaNoWriMo statement yesterday, it becomes somehow problematic to condemn generative AI, because what, do you hate DEMOCRACY? Do you not want everyone to have access to art and writing? Oh! Oh! Somebody doesn’t want the competition, doesn’t want the masses to rise up with the FREEDOM of their RENEWED ACCESS to ART and STORY, you PRIVILEGED ELITE BASTARD.
But I think it’s important to take the air out of these things (often by kicking the absolute shit out of them).
Generative AI is not democracy.
Generative AI is not free.
Because that’s the cornerstone of the idea, right? It’s a freely accessible tool that evens the playing field.
But generative AI has considerable costs.
Let’s go through them.
1. Money, Cash, Ducats, Coin
Access to much of generative AI will cost you actual money in many cases, though certainly it’s also becoming freely accessible at some levels — and more and more services are forcibly cramming it into their existing platforms, which, I’d like to note, is seriously fucking annoying. I’m waiting for the day where my microwave tries to write and sell its “slam poetry.”
Still, free now isn’t free forever. I mean, the “first taste is free” drug deal rule applies here, c’mon. They get you interested, you use it, and suddenly it costs more, and more, and then more again. They have to do this. The development of this fucking nonsense horseshit has been a billions-of-dollars investment. They want that money back, and if that means they have to put it on a chip and have Elon Musk fire it into your skull with a modified .22 rifle, then that’s how they’ll do it. If it remains free to use, then that means it’ll come with advertising jackhammered into it. (“Every time I ask it a question, it answers ‘Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme,’ wtaf.”)
2. Future Money
Generative AI is meant as a disruptor. And classically, disruption is not always a good thing. (One might argue it’s rarely a good thing.) Big shiny new tech company shows up, reinvents a thing by offering it cheaply and loopholing its way around regulations, you get hooked, the older industry withers on the vine, the shiny new tech company nests inside the chest cavity of the older industry until its dead and it can erupt out from the carcass in a spray of blood and bone, and then it just charges you even more than the older industry did for what may potentially be a lesser product.
As such, the way one can currently earn money from art and writing is at risk thanks to the rise of generative AI. How this might happen is myriad — Amazon getting flooded with AI books makes it harder to find any book; companies learn they can generate “content” with the push of a button and either choose to do so or use the threat of doing so as leverage to reduce the money they will pay for art and for writing; generative AI’s implementation damages enough outlets for art and writing and sends them packing, which means fewer outlets for artists and writers, which lowers opportunity and, by proxy, money; generative AI acts as a labor scab during union disputes for creators; writers and artists are no longer hired to iterate and create but rather to “edit” and “fix” the work “created” by generative AI, which is to say, generative AI artbarf robots puke up a bunch of barely digested material and a company pays a cut-rate to once-notable writers and artists to push that slurry into some kind of shape, like they’re Richard Dreyfuss with the mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And that’s just a sampling.
Ultimately, it puts power in the hands of corporations and tech-bros, and removes the power from artists and writers. And will try to eat away at copyright laws to do so.
That’s not democracy. And it certainly doesn’t come free.
3. Future Artists, Future Writers
There is a literal human cost. There will be people going forward — and, I’m betting, there are people right now — who are going to turn away from the art-and-writing path because of this. I know kids who already look at those career paths with the question of, “What’s even the point?” There will be a bonafide brain drain from the bank of artists and writers. (Not to mention teachers, or any other career currently being targeted and poached by generative AI on behalf of awful corporations.)
(And here, my conspiratorial eye-twitch red-thread-on-a-bulletin-board personality comes out and says, well, that’s awfully convenient — we’ve already seen such a heavy lean into STEM and away from the Humanities, because artists and writers tend to be thinkers, philosophers, they tend to have empathy, they tend to be less interested in the hustle culture churn of corporate life, and this only drives that nail in deeper, doesn’t it?)
Again, doesn’t sound like it’s democritizing shit. Anything that makes it harder and less likely to become a thing isn’t democritizing that thing.
4. The Costs of Actual Theft
Uh yeah, it steals shit. That’s how it works. It can’t do it without stealing shit. They’ve admitted it. Out loud. I don’t know how to explain to you the very real cost of having your work yanked out of the ether and thrown into the threshing maw of generative AI so your creations can become hunks of fake meat in their artbarf stew. But the cost isn’t metaphorical. It’s literal.
Once again, that’s not democritizing anything. It’d be like saying, “Ahh, Google has stolen your vote, and will vote on your behalf. How wonderful! You don’t even need to do it, now. We’ll handle it for you, for free. See? We’ve democritized democracy!”
God, even as I typed that out it feels alarmingly possible.
*shudder*
5. Environmental Cost
You don’t need to look far to learn about the environmental costs of generative AI. We didn’t ask for it, but it’s here, and even casual use can increase the burden on our environment.
We’re in danger of turning away from our already too lax environmental goals. We need coal and other fossil fuels gone, we need to protect water usage, and here comes AI to gobble up the water and our power and force us onto our back heel, all because some dickheads want a robot to lie to them about how many giraffes they see in Starry Night or because they need the magic computer to draw for them a picture of a 13-fingered Donald Trump freeing White Jesus from the cross with a couple of M-16s.
The only thing that’s democritizing is the death of our natural environment. Wow, nice work, Tech Bros. Guess that’s why Google removed their plan to DO NO EVIL from their mission statement.
6. The Damage to Informational Fidelity
It is increasingly hard to tell truth from fiction. Visually, textually, it’s getting easier and easier to just… lie, and to do so with effective facsimiles made from generative AI. Trump posting that Taylor Swift endorsed him, or creepy videos from Twitter’s AI showing Kamala Harris covered in blood and taking hostages, so newer abilities on a phone to just take an image and edit in whatever you want with the touch of a button — a giraffe, a bloody hammer, a hypodermic needle, a child’s toy, a sex toy, a loaded gun, whatever. The laws are far far too slow to catch this. This will be propaganda, given a nuclear-grade steroid injection. This will be revenge porn, god-tier level.
To sum up?
AI isn’t free.
It isn’t sustainable.
It isn’t democratizing a damn thing.
The tools and skills to create are already available. No, not perfectly, and no, the industries surrounding art and storytelling are certainly imperfect. But AI doesn’t push the existing imbalance into the favor of artists and writers, but rather, the opposite. And as it does so, it burns the world and fucks with our ability to tell truth from fiction, even right from wrong.
It’s weird. It’s horrible. I kinda hate it. I hope we all realize how absolutely shitty it is, and we can eventually shove its head in the toilet, same as we did with NFTs and crypto. Shove it in, give a good couple flushes.
Well, holy shit. I am shooketh to learn that Black River Orchard won the Dragon Award for Best Horror, up against formidable competition, and that is both an honor to me and a (pleasant) surprise. I was really quite sure I wasn’t going to win, and honestly, at the time of the win I was half-snoozling on the couch as we’d just spent the better portion of the day at the Ren Fair, and I was a bit snoozly, and suddenly my phone starts doing that vvbbtt vbbbt thing, and next thing I know I’m getting alerts from one of my BFFs, Delilah S Dawson and then another alert from buddy John Hartness and it was like, whoa what the fuck, I think I won?
Delilah, who was kind enough to read the speech at the awards for me, also won one too for her YA, Midnight at the Houdini, and then our pal John Scalzi won in his category for Starter Villain. It’s just cool. I’m quite lucky to be in such good company and further, to have readers and fans who went out there and voted and made this happen. So, thank you to all of you. The award is a beautiful glass — well, I dunno what it’s supposed to be, so let’s just go with a DRACONIC KIDNEY STONE — and so I will definitely use it in a variety of profane rituals! Probably involving an evil apple or two.
I also casually remind you that I’ll be out and about in the world soon for a variety of events, including some cool dates in the Midwest with Delilah and Kevin Hearne, and you can find a catalog of those upcoming dates here.
And some were surprised to learn you can buy that exact shirt amongst my goodly merch, designed by The Jordan Shiveley, and all that merch exists here with the mere clicking of this link.
Since we’re talking Instagram, I also note that is where you can go to view my (admittedly scarce) set of reels, which feature me, as of late, trying the S’MORES CUP NOODLES from Nissin, which uhhhh, is a thing I ate.
So, NaNoWriMo — the organization behind the official implementation of the challenge of National Novel Writing Month — has come out firmly on the side of generative AI. Further, they’ve gone and suggested that condemning generative AI is classist, ableist, and privileged.
I’ll keep this as short and sweet as I can —
The privileged viewpoint is the viewpoint in favor of generative AI. The intrusion of generative artificial intelligence into art and writing suits one group and one group only: the fucking tech companies that invented this pernicious, insidious shit. They very much want you to relinquish your power in creating art and telling stories to them and their software, none of which are essential or even useful in the process of telling stories or making art but that they really, really want you to believe are essential. It’s a lie, a scam, a con. Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry. It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story. And in stealing the material, by making that theft and regurgitation easy and effortless — so easy and so effortless that the essential human component of creation is extracted entirely from the process! — it limits the quality and value of art, watering it all down and turning it all to a soylent slurry. A valueless soylent slurry, which means, conveniently, that companies can pay little to nothing for art and content going forward because they can either just hit a button to have it shit out its gross recombination of stolen material, or, realizing that the stolen material is garbage, they can just say, “Well, we’ll pay you less, because otherwise we’ll just hit this stupid button for free.” The privilege here is on the tech companies and on NaNoWriMo. Art is for humans. Story is for humans. They are its makers, they are its witnesses.
You can be sure if you give NaNoWriMo any of your material, they are going to be feeding it to the artbarf robots to become just more shitty artbarf.
Let them push buttons and have robots tell stories to feed to other robots.
We humans can all stay far the fuck away from it. We can gather around the campfire and tell our stories to each other. True no matter who we are. Though the industry is often unfair (and classist, and ableist, and privileged) the act of telling stories is universal, and has existed as long as we have. (I’m sure Homer would have something to say about all this.)
(Er, the ancient Greek, not the cartoon doofus.)
Anyway.
If you want some good news, it’s that NaNoWriMo and generative AI have one very important thing in common:
You don’t need either of them to tell a good story.
I suspect that the book I presently get the most reader mail about (er, in a good way!) is The Book of Accidents. It’s a book that just really landed with people I think in a certain way, especially in how the book regards and reflects things like cycles of abuse and cascading trauma and all that — but also that it’s a book where at the core it’s a book about a family that loves each other and not a family that destroys itself with its secrets. (Not that there’s anything wrong with books featuring the opposite. But I just think some people connect with these characters in a variety of ways.)
(At least, that’s my hope.)
(It also sells pretty well, even still!)
(I don’t know why! Maybe it’s the evil spell I cast on the book. Or the Doritos powder I laced the pages with. Who can say?)
ANYWAY, that book is on sale today, digitally, for $1.99.
You can nab it at:
Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Apple Books and whatever other electric bookmonger you use to procure your various fancy fictions.
