Publication day for Aftermath
Today, The Repulse Chronicles, Book Seven: Aftermath was published on Amazon Kindle. If you pre-ordered the book, then you have it on your device now. I do hope you enjoy this last part of the story. Thank you so much if you’ve stayed with this series over the seven years it’s taken me to write. Aftermath is the final book, and probably the last novel I will write. Today, it’s summer in the forests of southeast Warsaw: the days are long and warm and the garden is verdant and needs work and I want to spend time outside. By the end of October, when darkness falls at 4.00pm, my opinion might change. However, with The Repulse Chronicles complete and only sketches of stories set in other subgenres of science fiction for me to mull, for the first time in ten years, I don’t know for sure where the next novel might come from, nor when.
I wrote my first novel-length manuscript 20 years ago, so it’s reasonable now to assess whether I have reached the objectives I set out for (well, hoped for). The genre fiction publishing landscape has changed remarkably since 2004. The first earthquake was the introduction of self-publishing; the second has been so-called artificial intelligence. It’s taken me seven years to write The Repulse Chronicles, around 600,000 words over seven novels.
ChatGPT will do the same for you in a day.
Don’t take my word for it. Open ChatGPT and tell it to write you a full-length novel. Set your parameters, e.g. “Write an 80,000-word science fiction novel about aliens who are a gas-based life form invading and attempting to take over Earth”. The AI will write it for you in front of your eyes, one chapter at a time, and then ask you if you’re happy with each part. You can change your parameters or thicken the plot, e.g. “Give the protagonist a drink problem,” or “Give the antagonist a drug addiction”. Yes, what the AI churns out will be trite, hackneyed and cliched. But it will also be fast-paced and typographically flawless. And it’s only going to get better at what it does.
Today, to say a book or a film seems like it’s been written by AI is an insult. In five years’ time, it will be so accepted as to be unremarkable and unremarked. In ten years’ time, people will wonder how anyone ever wrote anything before AI was there to guide them. Moreover, today there are over 50 million books for sale on Amazon. This number is likely to increase dramatically over the next year or so, as goldrush “entrepreneurs” hurry to upload millions of stories churned out by AI in minutes. As it was with the self-publishing revolution 15 years ago, so it will be again with AI.
Suddenly, it seems to me to be incredibly quaint to talk about taking a year to write a novel. A bit like deciding to invest in a forge and anvil, and dragging them down the nearest highway/motorway/autostrada, and firing up your furnace in the hope a traveller might pass by whose horse needs shoeing, while thousands of cars race by every hour. That’s the difference AI is going to make not just to novel-writing, but to all forms of storytelling. What hope the farmer with his scythe, while the combine harvester gobbles up everything around him?
Then again—and not for the first time—I could be wrong. The only thing I am fairly confident of is that, in a few years, we will not be able to tell difference between AI and non-AI content.
But I count myself incredibly lucky. I’ve managed to snag readers despite the overwhelming competition, and the last few years have especially been very satisfying. Readers have contacted me to thank me and ask when the next book is coming out, and I’ve enjoyed interacting with all of you. One of my favourites, among so many, was the reviewer who last year complained good-naturedly at the outrageous cliff-hanger on which Operation Repulse ended. I smile when I think that for that reader, the waiting is over.
It only remains for me to offer once again my sincerest thanks to all of you for spending your valuable time on my novels. There are enough classics of literature to keep even the keenest bookworm occupied for more than one lifetime, and that you chose to spend some of yours on my stories means the world to me. Thank you.
To finish, here’s a temporal comparison: Youngest Daughter in 2017, when I published Book One, Onslaught, and today, on the publication of Book Seven, Aftermath. I’m a lucky dad, and I’m very grateful for that, too.
