rznicolet

I really enjoyed The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott. The depth of the worldbuilding is a delight, and the vibes are exquisite -- it feels amazingly real, full of history and old traditions and cultures. It's a little slow for a modern novel (which I don't mind); it reminded me of an older book, in terms of quality (The Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh) that I also loved. It's the first book in a duology, so I really need to get my hands on the second book.

As to the story: to protect herself and her nephew from a local lord with an ugly grudge, a courier gets sucked into helping an obnoxious prince take a dangerous route to bypass an avalanche and deal with an urgent, secret mission. The mission gets complicated when said prince ends up possessed by a haunt from ancient ruins; and of course, the courier has her own secret to keep...

Alas, at present, AI mostly serves to fill my email folder with vapid praise that clumsily restates the back-of-the-book blurb and then tries to get me to give someone else money for dubious (nonexistent) marketing services.

We're already at the point where, for the vast majority of novelists (which is where I'm most knowledgeable), writing is not a primary source of income. With the exception of the very few bestsellers who are super-famous, most have other jobs or a spouse to provide income (and, in the US, health insurance). So most authors aren't doing it only for the money.

It's also hard to imagine a situation where authors are paid when AI ingests or remixes their work; this is already not the case. Legal cases have slapped down _piracy_, but it seems that _training_ is considered fair use, so long as the AI company buys at least one copy of the book.

There's no reason for the AI companies to bother paying anyone for their work.

But let's ignore all of that.

I write so I can tell the story. I write so other people can enjoy it -- so I can gross them out, or shock them with a clever plot twist they should've seen coming, or make them think about something differently, or let them have a moment of heartwarming joy, or just escape into a wild adventure of my own imagining. Otherwise, I'd just say "Odysseus had a long trip home" and be done.

If nobody reads my book unless it's been processed by an AI and mashed up with the writing of others... then nobody's actually reading _my_ book, and I see no purpose to throwing my work into the grinder.

Disclosure: I write novels, have one published, and plan to publish more, but I very much do not make a living off of them. Most of the (unlikely) futures in which I rely on writing income alone assume massive savings from my current tech job.

Never. In fact, the annoyances of the occasional helpful "Are you trying to use Siri?" pop-up motivated me to turn it off.

Sounds like this ancient XKCD: https://xkcd.com/242/ (Normal person doesn't pull the lever again; scientist wonders if that happens every time. I assume the engineer does, too...)

Yeah, I expect the tidal forces and whatnot are, shall we say, not negligible in practice.

It's even funnier that, at least around here, one of the biggest crime problems is people stealing copper wiring... from streetlights...

Small counterpoint to your analogy, as someone who studied astrophysics: I actually did have a requirement to understand general relativity! Deriving all of it independently from scratch wasn't something we did, but there _were_ derivations involved. And it was definitely worth working through -- it _is_ a good tool for understanding. (I've long since left the field, but I don't regret the work I did.)

In which I expound on a very petty complaint about fictional wormholes.

This reminds me very much of Buffer Time from Star Trek: Lower Decks, but applies pretty well to a lot of life. No slack = no margin for error or the unexpected...

I reread the famed short story recently, and had some thoughts about how we could try to avoid the bad ending in real life.

And, with publishers, you can get both monopoly _and_ monopsony problems. The latter is, I believe, one reason the attempt to consolidate from Big Five to Big Four failed -- I'm forgetting which two publishers were trying to merge, but angry authors talking about having difficulty selling books, and reduced pay for them, was a key argument.

Yeah... for new stuff, I follow authors I already like on social media and see what they recommend from other folks (and why). I've had a miss or two, but that's generally a good start.

As somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a handful of shots at the Big Five publishers with your manuscript. If they don't want it? It's small press or self-pub, and good luck getting your book above the sea of mediocrity.

The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers.

(And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)

Blood of the Old Kings, by Sung-Il Kim (translated by Anton Hur). Absolutely fabulous fantasy novel -- it's an about folks in an empire literally powered by the dead, and the folks fighting against its worst excesses. Very strange, mythological magic and excellent ethical through-line. This is a reread for me before I dive into the sequel.

You joke, but, alas, there is a _real_ company kinda trying to do this. Reflect Orbital[1] wants to set up space mirrors, so you can have daytime at night for your solar panels! (Various issues, like around light pollution and the fact that looking up at the proposed satellites with binoculars could cause eye damage... don't seem to be on their roadmap.) This is one idea that's going to age badly whether or not they actually launch anything, I suspect.

Battery tech is too boring, but seems more likely to manage long-term effectiveness.

[1] https://www.reflectorbital.com

Yes... but that ocean has a lot of trash and algal blooms to work around. If you're not careful, you end up the sea turtle with a stomach full of plastic.

That issue of varying quality of web-based information (and varying ability to assess said quality) has also been the case for a long time.

Watch the source - Avi Loeb has a poor reputation among solar system astronomers _and_ scientists who work on SETI and exobiology, due to poorly supported claims of alien (meaning intelligent) origin for many different things, including 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object found.

We'll get more data on this object as it comes deeper into the solar system. There's a lot of speculation going around, so don't over-index on any one person (but especially not this one). Odds are good it's "just" a very interesting comet.

Writing SFF novels!

I need to put it up on the ol' blog-thing, but I've signed a contract with a small press for a debut novel, which is highly exciting. That one's urban fantasy from the point of view of the wizard's magic cloak. (You better believe it has opinions.)

Meanwhile, I've been working on a novel about a group of time travelers who accidentally get stuck in the Permian, well before the dinosaurs. Surprise! There are still big animals that can eat you, they're just more weird (and not as big). The research for that one has been wild.

The ol' blog thing, where I post story-related tidbits and such: https://rznicolet.com

The 100 richest people are (by design) going to be very unrepresentative of the whole, depending on how "rich" is defined. How does the balance between inheritance and other sources of wealth shift if we look further down the list?

I suspect the late 1800s, another era when inheritance was a lesser source of extreme wealth, may also be unrepresentative of the "typical" state. Massive upheavals in technology (mass production, computerization/Internet) seem to me to be more likely to be exceptions, rather than the rule, over very long time horizons.

Regardless, we may be entering another era of consolidation since this article was written. It will be... interesting... to see how it shakes out.

Galatea is an old one I enjoyed, essentially as a character piece: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/emrhyy7pp0c8bjkjeuhs...

I'm not sold on generative AI for this purpose -- maintaining a consistent character who remembers and reacts appropriately given past interactions seems tough.

Everything coming in speeds up when it falls to earth.

Tiny stuff burns up completely in the upper atmosphere, where the pressure is low, because they have low surface area per mass -- the atmosphere can stop them entirely. Their terminal velocity is low. (That is, when the velocity through air is high enough that the drag prevents gravity from speeding up the object any further.)

Medium objects have a higher terminal velocity get deeper into the atmosphere before exploding. Fragments from these (which now have higher surface area per mass) can then be slowed further by the atmosphere and make it to the surface, but not so dramatically. Bits of the Chelyabinsk impactor fall into this category.

Big objects have a high terminal velocity. They make it to the ground largely intact... and without being slowed as much by the atmosphere. That gives you craters and bad days for being a dinosaur.

Aside from bog-standard machine learning for work purposes -- novels! (Because I apparently can't restrict myself to just one.)

You can see some of my world-noodling about aliens that don't need to breathe at: https://rznicolet.com

I've been plotting a series of hard sci-fi novels entirely from the point of view of very not-humanoid aliens. In this case, hard SF = all real physics except for FTL. First manuscript complete. Humans not included in the main series, except as passing footnotes. Let's just say that when I originally started, the pandemic had me feeling a touch misanthropic. We'll see when/how I actually publish these.

I write fantasy stuff, too, though since the blog is relatively new, I haven't started adding that in yet. I'm currently wrapping a sequel to a finished fantasy work (again, publication approach TBD) before switching back to relatively hard sci-fi.

I wonder how this is going to play out. At a company I previously worked for, we ended up not rolling out personalized on-site search because while the results were better in theory, in practice it was so slow nobody wanted to use it.

Then again, Google is so dominant that many folks won't quickly bounce to an alternative...