A Memory Seed Gallery

Midjourney images

Recently I used the Midjourney AI to interpret my books, using about six appropriate words for each novel. The results were often surreal, sometimes literal, occasionally amazing. Here they are in gallery form.

Memory Seed

Glass

Flowercrash

Muezzinland

Hallucinating

The Rat & The Serpent

Urbis Morpheos

Hairy London

Beautiful Intelligence

No Grave For A Fox

The Girl With Two Souls

The Girl With One Friend

The Girl With No Soul

Tommy Catkins

The Conscientious Objector

The Autist

Woodland Revolution

Tales From The Spired Inn

Tangerine Dream In The 1970s

Monique Orphan

Monica Orvan

Monica Hatherley

Why Rings Of Power Is Crap

First of all, yes I have watched it. After the first couple of episodes I realised it was most likely going to be rubbish, but, decent fellow that I am, I gave it a bit more time to improve. It got worse.

My reasons for calling it crap are fivefold: the overall concept, the accents, the look, the music, and the execution.

This series is basically a group of fans doing everything they can to attach Tolkien’s name to their new television work. It exists for no other reason. It’s not required, it doesn’t begin to touch the mood, subtlety and flowing script of the original film trilogy, and it hasn’t even found a coherent story amidst the scraps of Second Age material Tolkien’s estate allowed the writers to use. Some parts, eg. the Numenorean harbour, do look spectacular, but frankly the overall look is stodge veneered in CGI gloss; and if they can’t even spend their money on making it look special, why bother? As for the overall look and concept… you could use exactly the same film footage, change the story so it’s set in some half-arsed version of Constantinople, and nobody would notice.

The accents – which have rightly caused a storm of annoyance – are spectacularly crass. As usual, the whimsical, straw-haired Harfoots are characterised by being Irish. There’s no other way to say it: this is cultural appropriation. It’s so carelessly blatant you wonder about the focus groups the script writers used, if any. And Lenny Henry – what was he thinking? Lenny Henry is a fantastic, subtle and highly intelligent actor, but this… this is embarrassing. Inevitably, the dwarves are Scottish. Some of them are just a couple of checks away from wearing kilts. I kept expecting the bagpipes to be hauled out. Just ridiculous. Meanwhile, the elves all appear to have gone to school at Eton. I think if there’s one aspect of this tv car crash which disgusts me the most, it’s those accents. And while I’m on the topic… I’m presuming there won’t be a Welsh cultural appropriation. There never is, is there?

The look? Shite. Who on earth designed Elrond’s hairstyle? It looks like he’s wearing a hedgehog that’s spent an hour in a wind tunnel. As for Durin’s beard… is that proper Highland sheep’s wool they used? I bet it was. And the trio of wolves in episode 5, well, they did look as though some small CGI progress had been made since Jurassic Park. Then there’s the overall look, which aims to replicate that of the original film trilogy. Yes, if you want to eat nothing but chocolate I’m sure that’s very nice for a while. But soon chocolate begins to pall. Also, on its own, its not terribly nutritious.

As for the music… this is quite the most anonymous score I’ve ever heard. It literally has no content. It sounds as though the composer threw a couple of staves of descending scales into a vat of lemon Flash. As for the cod-Irish tune accompanying the Harfoots migration… could that have been any more offensive? I’m not sure it could have. I think we hit peak offence there.

So to execution. If you’re going to throw in sixth form prose like “in order to see the light you have to touch the dark,” do it once per episode, not every bloody minute. Some of the dialogue in the later Numenorean council scenes made Lucas’ second Star Wars trilogy sound like Shakespeare. Pretentious, ponderous and portentous doesn’t begin to cover it. And while we’re on the subject of words beginning with p, we’ve begun calling it Rings Of Poo in my home. Meanwhile, the other aspect to this is all the re-writing. For instance, the elves will die overnight because of mithril? Really? Overnight, eh? I hear the sound of Tolkien rotating in his grave. And did they really need to waste an entire episode with Galadriel on the sea, not to mention five episodes refusing to tell us anything about the strange old man in the meteorite?

To balance this diatribe, there is some good stuff. The guy playing Sauron is excellent, and his orcs all look suitably horrific. But that’s about it.

I began watching Rings Of Power suspecting it was going to be a mess, and poor quality too, but if it had been good I would have been perfectly happy to change my mind. Its worse than a mess and worse than poor. It has been ripped bleeding from the less important part of Tolkien’s world, then inflated with hot air to unrecognisable proportions. What is so galling is how comprehensively un-Tolkien the whole thing is. With skill and diligence the makers have wrung out every last drop of Tolkien’s vision, until absolutely nothing is left. I suppose, in the end, some will laud that as quite a feat.

James Lovelock’s Influence On Me

I discovered James Lovelock’s work by accident. Hunting for environmental books one day in a secondhand bookshop, I saw one called Gaia. The blurb on the back was intriguing…

It was some time between the mid 1980s and 1988 when I picked up that book and bought it, little knowing what an impact it would have on me. When in 1988 I wrote the first draft of a novel that eight years later would become my debut Memory Seed, the notion of a self-regulating planet fired my imagination to new heights. I knew little of the controversy created by the Gaia Hypothesis at the time – all I knew was what an amazing idea it was, and how well supported by the evidence James Lovelock presented in his book. To me, Gaia’s existence was self-evidently true.

That was rather a naive view, I think, borne on sheer enthusiasm for the concept. Lovelock sophisticated his ideas throughout his later life, supporting it with better and more expansive evidence, so that many of the scientists who rejected the hypothesis when it was first proposed became convinced of its value. And indeed, Gaia Theory, as it is now, has made several predictions all tested in the real world and shown to be true.

My novel Memory Seed however did take a bit of a liberty with Lovelock’s idea. In 1992, when I wrote the second draft of the novel, all the main elements of the published book were present, including the concept of our planet “fighting back” against a humanity which has harmed it. That concept was meant to have both metaphorical weight and real weight. I regret this a little now, since of all people Lovelock found annoying, hippie types who misinterpreted his theory were the worst. However, I did not myself imagine Gaia to be a conscious entity taking deliberate decisions, my science background making the ideas of positive and negative feedback in self-regulating systems perfectly acceptable – and anyway, I had encountered them in my thinking about consciousness and AI. But I did take the metaphorical side of Gaia Theory a bit far in Memory Seed, allowing literary motives to outweigh scientific. I know it’s only fiction, but I do feel a bit bad about it all now.

In Urbis Morpheos I tried to reset the imbalance by conceiving of a scenario where an apparently active Gaia and an apparently active Agaiah, the former Gaia and the latter a construct of the manufacturing ecosystem, fight for control of planet Earth. I’m not entirely sure I succeeded, but, hey, it was SF set a million years in the future…

But back to James Lovelock. This was a man who had a life of extraordinary achievement. We shall not see his like again. Quite apart from the brilliance of the central idea of Gaia Theory, he also invented the electron capture device which allowed us to realise the danger of the ozone hole years before it otherwise would have become apparent, and invented numerous other amazing devices. He wrote superb, thought-provoking books of truth, of science, of deep knowledge. Perhaps above all he was a truly independent scientist, scorning and spurning the way science is done these days within vast, impersonal corporations in hock to capitalist masters. He had the opportunity to allow his mind to range widely, as almost no scientist these days does. He was one of a kind: a genius, an inspiration. I strongly suspect the main reason he survived to be 103 was that for all his days he had a profound meaning to his life: the advancement of humanity’s ideas about the planet we live on. I think David Attenborough also benefits from this attitude to life. Lovelock never stopped thinking, writing, working. His was a life of deep meaning, of wonder at the incredible planet we live upon. He will be missed, yet he will live on through his legacy; and that legacy, being scientific ideas proven to have universal truth, will be a part of humanity all the way into the far future.

He gave us a gift, wisdom, which is the greatest gift of all.

A chat with Toby Frost

Today I’m talking with author Toby Frost about the themes behind his new novel The Imposters, recently reviewed here…

Toby: We’ve both written about robots and intelligent computers, but I don’t think either of us is solely trying to predict the future of artificial intelligence. Are stories about robots and AI always really about people?

Steve: I think that in the great majority of cases they are about people, for the same reason that stories about aliens are almost always really about people. I only got into writing AI novels because of my background in the field of consciousness and the evolution of the human mind, and because SF has dealt so badly in the past with the subject of AI. I had a particular reason for writing Beautiful Intelligence and No Grave For A Fox, which is that every AI novel and film I’ve ever read or seen assumes the separable existence of “something” inside our brains, which by implication can be subject to all sorts of speculative transformations in fiction. Uploading minds, uploading memories, downloading minds, and so on and so on… Peter Godfrey-Smith’s new book Metazoa has a few paragraphs specifically berating genre authors for their crap AI speculations, something I was so pleased to read I emailed him my congratulations. How do you approach speculation and tales about AIs in your novel? Are you teasing out interesting parts of the human psyche through the use of such concepts?

Toby: I should start by saying that I know absolutely nothing about computers, and less than that about AI. I think instead of looking at how AI would realistically work, I was interested in the way that robots and androids are portrayed in stories, and in trying to do something new with that. Many stories about androids are stories about slavery, and I wanted to talk about what might happen when you’ve accepted that these machines are people and have rights of their own. What happens next? Likewise, female androids often exist to make some kind of satirical point about male sexuality (or for straight-out titillation) but what if you take that element out, and just let them do their own (strange) thing?

I think that once you take out the idea that humans are “special” in some mystical way, more interesting options appear. For one thing, why would any robot want to be human? I can imagine Pinocchio thinking “Hey, I’m made of wood! I’m immortal! Why the heck would I want to be a real boy?” It also makes it harder to indicate a tipping point where the AI becomes “one of us.” William Gibson has some interesting AIs in the Sprawl novels: they can think and even have citizenship, but they’re very alien.

(Just as an aside, I wonder if people in science fiction stories ever read science fiction. They might learn something…)

Steve: I also know nothing about computers, which is why I only use Apple Macs! But seriously… I agree that it is presumed by most, if not all genre authors and film directors that a “human” android is the ultimate end goal. I think this relates a lot to the standard human delusion of becoming a deity by creating a human being. It’s a bog-standard cliché mostly rooted in religious dogma. I wrote my last AI novel The Autist partly in an attempt to portray an AI future in which human-ness was not a goal, or, in one case, even a plausible option. You are so right to ask the question: why would any robot want to be human? A lot of what we are, including mentally, is based in our physical form, and that form does not have to be mimicked by androids. I have to state my different position on the question of human-ness however. I think human beings are special, just not in a mystical way but in a way that is perfectly (and easily) explicable. This in itself however leads to some very interesting paths of genre speculation, which I think authors have hardly touched.

William Gibson, brilliant though he was and is, he got it massively wrong when presenting two AIs becoming “conscious” just because of conjoined computing power. Thinking and having citizenship: yes. Consciousness: no. But, to be fair, portrayal of AI in fiction is not easy. We SF authors have the right to speculate, but in doing so we should in my opinion stay within reason as currently agreed. Anything else counts as fantasy. (I’m aware that this is not a terribly popular view these days, not least because of Clarke’s Third Law.) For me, it is useful and desirable in portraying AI to distinguish between speculation based in current knowledge and that based elsewhere.

I’ve finished reading The Impostors now, and I noted that your take on this is rooted in identity. Would that be a correct reading?

Toby: That’s an interesting idea, that robot SF is anchored to ideas of a deity. Presumably, by that logic, the closer one gets to human, the closer one gets to divine… And of course you’ve got Frankenstein usurping God in creating life. I wonder if, like the whole “female robot as male fantasy” angle, it’s one of those concept that you need to jettison before you can start approaching the idea from a new angle. Helen says at one point that her personality is purely a construct, placed on top of a powerful computer to make it easier for her to fit in with humans. I’m not sure she’s truly conscious – but then, how do you prove it, and does it really matter?

For me, sometimes the SF serves the entertainment – although it’s still got to feel right. Helen, the android in The Imposters, is the way she is partly to provide an amusing and entertaining character, but I think she works within the criteria of the story. I don’t think for a moment that we’d get anything like her in the future.

“Identity” is a wide term, especially now, but I agree with you. Both lead characters don’t quite fit in: Helen is synthetic, and Richard has gaps in his memory. I find something appealing and vaguely eerie about that. They’re both “faking it” in a way. I find it quite hard to sum it all up in a sentence, but it’s about the balance of being yourself and being someone who functions smoothly within society – which feels a bit pretentious given that it’s an action comedy. Do you write to explore an idea, like AI, or is it more a case of coming up with the story and then realising what it’s really about in the editing stage?

Steve: Proving Helen’s status as conscious or otherwise is impossible, but it would be possible to make an educated guess, given knowledge of the circumstances of her creation.

Helen works very well in your story, and actually I think that kind of character in the future is possible. We humans are so easy to confuse and delude, especially when it comes to anthropomorphism, at which we are painfully good. You could read The Imposters on the presumption that Helen is faking human behaviour really well. Alas, I think we will come up with such machines (or programmes) quite soon – deep personality fakes, you could say. It will be exceptionally difficult to interact with such programmes and not fall into the trap of believing they are human. Richard does tell himself a few times what Helen is, but does he really believe his own conclusion? I’m not so sure…

My AI novels always have a strong theme first, then the characters and a few basic ideas arrive, then the story based on those characters. In Beautiful Intelligence & No Grave For A Fox it was about the possibility of AC (Artificial Consciousness), while The Autist takes the opposite view and posits a non-conscious AI dystopia.

Toby: One of the things this conversation keeps reminding me is how difficult it is to work out what an AI would actually want. The film Ex Machina is largely about a robot trying to escape from a room – but it would have to be programmed to want that, or else to have developed the wish to do so, perhaps by extrapolating the existing data. If I remember rightly, Skynet from the Terminator films had decided that it wasn’t safe while humans could shut it down, and the only way to be really sure was to destroy all humans. Drastic, but logical.

I’m glad that Helen works: even a story that’s tongue-in-cheek has to ring true in some way, or to work within its own rules. I think comedy becomes weaker when it misses that. Helen is sincere, but she is also faking being human. Richard definitely does think of Helen as human at points. His feelings towards her are probably rather a mess! I suspect this humanising of AI is the opposite of the uncanny valley principle: if it looks like a person, it surely must be, right? I wonder if that’s linked to the instinct many people have to give others the benefit of the doubt, and to try to explain away what looks like madness or outright villainy. A sort of false optimism.

I think you write in a different way to me. The characters, story and underlying ideas are very intermeshed in my mind. During 2020, I wrote a novel to take my mind off the heatwave, the pandemic and politics. It ended up with a mob trying to storm the planet’s parliament! That seemed like the natural end of the story (and it was) but I’m sure it was a response to the American election, too. I think I probably start with a gut feeling that something would be fun to write about, and it spirals off from there. I do find the creative process both very interesting and hard to explain!

Steve: Yes, I think it’s easy for us humans to forget that in most cases we’re not using reason, let alone logic, at all, though we do convince ourselves that we are being reasonable… We have this sometimes cute, sometimes fatal urge to anthropomorphise everything, and that applies to genre work as much as anything else, usually to the detriment of the novels in question. Of course, the problem with being realistic about AI is the same problem as being realistic about aliens. Where do you draw the line between readable/understandable and accurate/true? An AI could in theory be impossible to understand. The famous question, “What is it like to be a bat?” could be replaced with, “What is it like to be an AI?”

Your novel is absolutely consistent, which is admirable, and works well. The Uncanny Valley is a strange phenomenon, one people are still trying to understand. In a way it is the antidote to anthropomorphism, in that it shows us that when something is on the border between definitely human and definitely not human there is something exceedingly peculiar waiting for us. I recently wrote a novel based on the Uncanny Valley which perhaps illustrates how I approach writing. One thing to take into account is that I almost never read fiction, it’s 99% non-fiction. But I’ve always been like this. Theme first, then people in that theme, then all the rest; and they do intermesh later on in development. I’ve read a lot about the Uncanny Valley and human evolution, so it was a natural theme for me. Only later did the three main characters come along, with their respective viewpoints, flaws and idiosyncrasies. My writing style could be summarised as plotter and pantser, in that my plots are pretty tight right from the beginning, but within that there is room for pantsing – the details. Even my crazy novel Hairy London, which I wrote off the top of my head without self-editing, had a basic theme underlying the surreality.

Have you got anything else coming up in your Helen/Richard milieu?

Toby: I think there’s a line in The Imposters where Helen says that the question she always wonders is “What’s it like to be you?”, which really can’t be answered. But I suppose that’s what fiction tries to do: to see what other people would do. There’s something about the uncanny valley that I find fascinating, which feeds back into that idea of robots as imitation people and the difficulty of passing yourself off as normal.

I read quite a lot of non-fiction, too. Part of it is time and lifestyle: I used to read a lot on the train to work, but I don’t use the train half as much now. I agree that I’ve never quite figured out that whole plotter/pantser thing: it’s never felt very relevant to how I write. I turn ideas over in my mind in quite a lot of detail, but I often don’t know exactly how they’re going to fit together until I start writing.

I would love to write more about Richard and Helen. I think a second book would be less about being a robot and more about different aspects of their setting: I’d quite like to write a story about how you end a war and start a peace, for instance. I think a war story can be quite clean-cut, with clear heroes and villains, but a spy story is often more nuanced and “grey”. But I’ve got a lot of other things going on right now, not least the third book of my Renaissance fantasy trilogy, which I’m hoping to release later this year. Lots to do! What have you got planned next?

Steve: At the moment, very little. I planned to have a lengthy writing break in 2020, but then Covid struck… Last year was a bit of a nightmare for me, and this year is about personal consolidation. In all honesty I’m not sure what comes next. Thanks ever so much for this conversation, it’s been really interesting. I especially like your line about humans presuming that an AI would want to be like them. An excellent point!

Conjuror Girl new review

Great new review from Mark Hayes at the Passing Place blog, concluding his thoughts on the Conjuror Girl trilogy.

Shrewsbury Museum Workshop

I’m pleased to say I’ve been asked to give a workshop at Shrewsbury Museum in June, following on from the enjoyable and successful Write Here, Write Now event last Friday. My theme will be “firsts” – first sentence, first paragraph, plus book titles and blurbs. It will be a two hour workshop, with attendees only needing pen and paper.

The museum…

Museum Event Tonight

I’m looking forward to it!

Shrewsbury Museum Event

On Friday 25th March, starting at 7:30pm, I’ll be one of the guest authors at the Shrewsbury Museum evening. Maggie Love is hosting the evening; she’s the artistic director at Shrewsbury Youth Theatre, amongst many other things.

The evening begins in and around the current Ladybird Exhibition. We guest authors will be talking about our creative processes, modes of writing, etc, and our careers in general. I’ll have a few copies of my novels for sale. Come along if you can!

Tickets are ten pounds. https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/shropshire/shrewsbury-museum-art-gallery/write-here-write-now/e-vebekb

Shrewsbury…

Author Event

I’m pleased to have been invited to attend an author event with four others at Shrewsbury Museum. Called ‘Write Here, Write Now,’ it’s on 25th March at 7pm. All welcome, and wine is promised.

Quite near the museum.