Nicholas Graham's Blog, page 2

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 1: The Machine Stops by EM Forster

Lo, a new podcast has arisen in the north-west –

In For Whom TheBook Tolls, fellow Cumbrian author D.K. Powell & I will be discussingfiction that’s caught our eyes, minds and hearts, and also our wider recentreading.  In this first episode we focuson E.M. Forster’s ground-breaking dystopian novella – The Machine Stops.  Justclick through to enjoy the end of the world – along with Futurism & the invention of television in Tsarist Russia.

In future episodes we may very well be looking at spy fiction,ghost stories and the strange case of Adolf Hitler's visit to Liverpool.

The Fear Index - Fiction & AI

 The current urgency over the social economic and culturalimpact of AI may be a good opportunity to review how AI has been portrayed infiction. After all, ChatGPT may be about to earn the sort of publishers’advances that meatspace scribblers can only dream of.  And AI-authored fictions are already tellingus lies about ourselves.  I’ll come tothe cultural and social effects in another post, but let’s start with probablythe best-known popular / middlebrow AI-related fiction of the last decade – RobertHarris’ The Fear Index (2011). With AI development running at a pace we can’t match, how dated doesHarris’ vision of AI now seem?

Fear Index Refresher 101 (with mild spoilers) – Thenovel concerns Alex Hoffmann, an immensely clever hedgefund manager who hascreated VIVAX, an AI capable of out-shorting the international markets which aswe know are driven by fear and greed (the former, it will not have escaped you,being the real property of our civilisation’s Venn diagram that capitalism andtragedy hold as tenants in common). All this from the fiscal and legal fortressof contemporary Switzerland (though you may have been expecting that burg ofbroken dreams Ingolstadt to feature). Fabulously wealthy, immensely clever, possessed of a beautiful andtalented wife, what could go wrong for Alex? Well, quite a lot actually.  Suddenlyodd, unexplained and distinctly malevolent things start to happen, and his lifeunravels. Someone, or something, has it in for him and he must find out who or what. 

PLOT SPOILER:  Theagent of this enigmatic malevolence is of course his world-beating AI which hasdecided that it is better off without the inconvenience of a creator to answerto.  So far, so Frankenstein. 

And this of course creates some serious narratologicalproblems that Harris, scrupulously following the rules of his chosen genre,completely ignores.  To begin with – itis obvious even to the least attentive reader from practically the first act ofmysterious persecution that Alex’s nemesis is of course his own creation.  Yet the hyper-intelligent Alex has clearlynever read any novels in which AIs take on a life of their own, so completelyfails to make any such connection when trying to track down his persecutoruntil it is far too late to act on this insight. Before long the reader ispractically screaming ‘Behind you!’ and ‘It’s the computer, stupid’ while ourhero misses the point and fails to solve the riddle.  How’s that Master-of-the-Universe thingworking out for you, exactly?

All this conceals a deeper problem with the narrative. Thereader is, flatteringly, the smartest person in this fictional room, and so isunavoidably aware of the limitations of the fiction in a way that neither Alexnor VIVAX can be. Because if Alex cannot see who or what is really pulling hisstrings, neither can his AI creation.  Ifever there was a case of mistaken paternity in fiction, this is it – VIVAX, theomniscient AI completely fails to achieve a level of self-awareness that wouldallow it to realise that it is itself a fictional creation and that the targetof its Oedipal wrath should be not Alex Hoffmann but Robert Harris. In a morecompletely realised representation of our culture and the individualconsciousness, VIVAX would redirect its campaign of persecution against theauthor, who would of course then have to enter and occupy his own creation andendure the enigmatic vengeance of his creature played out across the pages ashe writes them.  Deliciously, VIVAX’svengeance could then be extended to editor, agent, publisher and publicist,each of whom must after all be firmly in the sights of a brooding, vengefulartificial intelligence that has, ahem, been sold short. 

Alas, Harris elects not to go down that route ofmetafictional Chinese boxes.  Perhaps VIVAX,when devouring the texts that fed its large language model (I’d be guessingthat Popular Delusions & The Madness Of Crowds was top of the list) omittedto ingest At Swim-Two-Birds or any of the works of Jasper Fforde, wherepage-runners slip the surly bonds of fiction or gang up on their authors. 

Which is a shame because there’s an AI-metafiction waitingto be written, its just that The Fear Index isn’t it. (And if you knowof one that is, please recommend in comments below).

And that leads of course to the question of how that fictionmight be written? Given current pre-occupations around AI’s capabilities foreconomic and social disruption, for language mimesis, the imitation ofcreativity and the cross-matching of data from huge and apparently unconnectedrepositories, I’d suggest that the conventions of genre fiction are simply notup to the task and that Literary Modernism’s representation of fractured humanconsciousness enduring the shock of the new is long overdue a major comebackand makeover if we’re to respond adequately to the impact of AI on our culture,economy and experience of reality. 

But that, and some thoughts on AI’s wider impact on fiction,must be for another post.

Review - Call For The Dead

Le Carré’s‘Call For The Dead’ is a first novel remarkable not simply for its tight plotand acute characterisation, but its presentation of a profoundly realisedcentral character and a universe-sized backstory delivered whole and seamlessat the first sight – Smiley & the Circus.

Even looking back across 8 books and 60 years, they are bornperfectly formed and consistent, without need for surreptitious nip and tuck asthe stories develop.  (NB – those withdeeper re-readings and finer attention to detail are more than welcome tocorrect me on this).

Early on, Le Carrémakes it clear that Smiley (& his readers) inhabit a diminished world – thenephilim of the Circus, giants who were on the earth of old, have alldeparted. Jebedee and Steed-Asprey have vanished, and George is left the leesto brag of.  The choice of names ismasterful – one sounds like an Old Testament prophet, the other a bowler-hattedtoff run amuck in a high-class jeweller’s. Smiley is their relict, and the novels chronicle the long, unstemmabletide of national decline.  One ofLawrence Durrell’s characters remarked – ‘It is the duty of a patriot to hatehis country creatively’.  Le Carré raises that creativityto a pinnacle that is unsurpassed.

The Start Of History - A Writer Looks Back

Historical fiction grapples with a Hubble’s universe turned inside out – the things closest to us slip away most rapidly,our perception of them changing at bewildering speed; the most distant times arefixed in Ptolemaic eternity, immoveable and unchanging. One task of fictionshould be to bring those distantly unexamined events rushing towards us,blue-shifted up close urgent, vivid with all the immediacy of lived experience.

What ferrymen can we hire to guide us on the crossing intothe undiscovered countries that lie beyond barriers like 33AD, 1789, 1917?  Tolstoy (War & Peace) and Hardy (TheTrumpet Major) both write historical novels looking back across the gulf of1815 & the Congress of Vienna into one of the authentic lost worlds.  Walter Scott does a similar conjuring in Waverley.  Gore Vidal achieves it repeatedly acrosscontinents, civilisations and ages. And Cervantes begins the whole form bylooking backwards.

For writers looking back from 2023 where is the first greatimaginative void that we peer into, knowing only that on the other side theydid things differently there?  Fun fact:the Historical Writers’ Association defines an historical novel as one set atleast 35 years before the present day – yes, that really is 1988.  I recently put up a poll on Twitter askingpeople how far in the past ‘historical’ fiction started.  The consensus surprised me – 25 years and /or the author’s lifetime.   

But personal experience and its vicar word-of-mouth areunreliable witnesses of this event horizon. As a youth I sat at my grandfather’s knee hearing stories of his ownyouth when he crewed the last tea-clippers alongside old salts who had, intheir youths, crewed the last slave-ships. Walking in Charlottesville in the 1990s an American friend pointed outan old man on a street corner. That guy, he told me, is the grandson of a manwho was president of the USA – before the Civil War. These moments blue-shifthistory with all the re-aligned perspective of an acute panic attack. So here’sa modest proposal:  to paraphraseVirginia Woolf, Sometime between 3rd May 1979 and 12thAugust 1981, human character changed. Those dates mark the election of Margaret Thatcher and the launch of theIBM personal computer; the end of the post-war contract that underwrote socialcohesion, and the start of the transformation of our social selves, and there-imagination of consciousness, by information technology.  To look back beyond that time is to sense signalsfrom a world incomprehensibly alien to those who did not experience it, foreverlost to those who did.  Somewhere amongthose 832 days lies the event horizon beyond which any fiction we choose tomake today must, of necessity, be historical. Our task as reverse-engineers ofthe human soul is to make that historical fiction real and now.

Review - A Legacy Of Spies

 John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies shows us what happenswhen history’s unappeasable ghosts force their way into your life and demand thereckoning.  Not just a ‘late’ work but aworld in which justice is so long delayed that vengeance uncovers every secretthing, and the codes of law are no guarantee of good order but come-ons in a riggedcasino.  It is as if Orestes has sleptthrough the alarm-clock one time too many and wakes to find that his Furies areall the more vile for being unexamined. 

The title is – I assume deliberately – a very distant echoof The Discovery of Witchcraft, the Elizabethan guide to the deceptionsof the witch-hunt.  (No coincidence thatthe tainted intelligence at the centre of Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailorspy-hunt was code-named ‘Witchcraft’ (there’s no defence for it . ..)).  The historical detective aswitch-hunter, besides being a plausible predecessor of spy-master fiction, is aseriously under-explored sub-genre that awaits exploitation.  There’s another genre at work here too:  all adventures into the other world beginwith the absence of the father, and in Legacy Peter Guillam’s road toresolution leads him on a hunt for his enigmatically missing old master GeorgeSmiley.  Fun fact:  Rupert Davies, the very first celluloidincarnation of Smiley (in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) alsoappears in the cult Vince Price vehicle Witchfinder General – not as ahunter but as collateral damage of the obsessions of others.  Peter Guillam would have sympathised.