Matt Ruff's Blog, page 2

Happy Election Day to those who celebrate

I thought about writing a topical Election Day post, but everyone’s on edge or pissed off right now, so instead I took a hike up to European Foods and bought five pounds of frozen Ukrainian dumplings for dinner. I probably won’t eat them all at one sitting but it’s nice to have the option.

If you need a distraction while you’re waiting for the poll results, the Fear of God podcast just finished a rewatch of the entire Alien franchise, and I joined them for the discussion of Alien: Covenant. (Spoiler alert, I’m not a fan, but as was the case with Prometheus, I think it’s an interesting failure that offers plenty to talk about.)

I’m 59 today

2024 Olive Editions now in stores

The 2024 Harper Perennial Olive Edition limited series is in bookstores today.

Thanks to my editor, Jennifer Brehl, I now have a full set of all eight trade paperbacks: Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Tananarive Due’s The Between, Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, Edgar Allen Poe’s Classic Works, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and of course my own Lovecraft Country.

If you’d like a signed or inscribed copy of the OE Lovecraft Country, contact Secret Garden Bookshop (206-789-5006 / bookshop@secretgardenbooks.com). They can hook you up with any of my other in-print novels as well, and they ship worldwide.

In two weeks

A reminder that the 2024 Harper Perennial Olive Editions series will be in bookstores on August 27. I just got my author copies of the Olive Edition Lovecraft Country, and they look great.

Little, Big 40th Anniversary Edition

As you can see, I have received my long-awaited 40th Anniversary Edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big. When I originally placed the order for it back in 2005, it was known as the 25th Anniversary Edition, but then, complications ensued, and for a while it was touch-and-go as to whether it would ever materialize.

It was worth the wait. The finished book is a work of art that my Android phone photos can’t hope to do justice to. For a closer look at the interior, there’s a pdf of the first chapter on the Little, Big website, here. The illustrations are by Peter Milton, whose website and portfolio can be found here.

If you’d like to get a copy for yourself, you’re in luck—though the lettered and numbered editions sold out long ago, unsigned trade editions are still available here.

And even if you have no interest in a collector’s edition, I would absolutely recommend checking out the novel, in whatever format you can get your hands on. Crowley is an enormously gifted storyteller who has been a huge influence on my own writing, and Little, Big, the book that introduced me to him, remains one of his finest works.

Lovecraft Country is one of this year’s Olive Editions

Harper Perennial has just announced the lineup for their 2024 Olive Editions. The Olive Editions are an annual limited trade paperback series that reprints “bestselling and celebrated” books with new cover art.

This year’s theme is horror, and Lovecraft Country is one of the featured titles. I’m in great company: the other books on the list are Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Tananarive Due’s The Between, Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, Edgar Allen Poe’s Classic Works, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The original cover illustrations for all eight volumes are by Milan Božić.

The on-sale date for the books is Tuesday, August 27, but you can preorder them right now using the links above or through this page on my Bookshop.org affiliate store.

The Fear of God podcast: Hell House LLC

This week I return once more to the Fear of God podcast, to talk about the Hell House LLC franchise (which I also covered in a recent Lovecraft binge-watch). You can check out the conversation here.

Subterranean Press now taking preorders for the signed limited edition of The Destroyer of Worlds

Subterranean Press is now taking preorders for their signed limited edition of The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country. The book is illustrated by David Palumbo, who also did the art for the Sub Press edition of Lovecraft Country. You can preorder here; the finished books will ship in June.

At Crypticon this Saturday (5/4)

I will be a guest at this weekend’s Crypticon, which is being held at the Doubletree by Hilton Hotel near SeaTac Airport (18740 International Blvd).

On Saturday, I’ll be appearing on the “Writers Workshop: World Building” panel at 3 PM and the “Writers Workshop: Writing Horror Across Various Mediums” panel at 8 PM, both in Cascade 10. Hope to see you there!

In which an AI hallucinates the content of my novels

My wife recently got a Google alert about a website/app called Bookey, a sort of digital Cliff Notes that offers summaries and analyses of more than a thousand books. including my novel Lovecraft Country. There’s a feature that lists the “30 Best Quotes” from a book, along with explanations of each quote’s significance. Very handy for anyone looking to cut-and-paste their English homework.

Trouble is, Bookey’s content appears to be generated by an AI, and in the case of Lovecraft Country, all of the quotations are fabricated. They don’t even sound like me:

This quote, according to Bookey, “encapsulates the complex emotions experienced by the narrator at a young age.” Ah yes, the ten-year-old first-person narrator of Lovecraft Country—what was her name again? I can’t recall. I also can’t recall ever using the word “bourgeois” unironically. And “loathe their whiteness” feels more 2020s than 1950s.

Bookey also offers imaginary quotations from Set This House in Order and Bad Monkeys.

That one made me laugh out loud. I also liked “Hell is other people, especially the really bad ones.” But I didn’t write it.

After I got done vanity searching my own novels, I spot-checked some books by other authors, to see whether Bookey’s AI would do better with more famous works. The list for Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House does manage to quote (or misquote) some of the more iconic lines, but it also includes this figment, which “perfectly captures the mysterious and haunting essence of the story”:

The list of purported quotes from Stephen King’s The Shining opens with the “Here’s Johnny!” line that Jack Nicholson improvised for Kubrick’s movie adaptation. There are three separate lists for Gone With the Wind, one of which claims the novel was written by “Herb Bridges.” A list for H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness” gets most of its quotations from Orwell’s 1984, and throws in this gem for good measure:

A lot of artists I know are freaking out about AI right now, so I should probably note that I’m not upset about Bookey; I think it’s hilarious. Part of what fascinates me about large language models like ChatGPT is precisely their tendency to go off the rails and start hallucinating like this. That being said, I would not recommend signing up for Bookey’s premium service. You can get more than enough entertainment value poking around the website for free.