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Giving up on Mars, again

E. M. Foner on Writing SciFi - Foner Books Website

I've been earning my living as an author for thirty years, but it's increasingly clear that AI is going to put me out of business. I've included artificial intelligence as a key driver in most of my science fiction, even when it's banned, like in the "Under the Influencers" series. But the AI slop you've heard about is here and it's beginning to take over the indie book publishing space. If you're gobbling up books by a new author who's dropping a 400 page tome every month, odds are it's AI. I've seen multiple books in the top 1,000 on Amazon that are not only written by AI, but the whole wrapper, the author page and bio, is too-good-to-be-true, and most readers love it. After three decades making my living as an author and publisher, the last thirteen years of which I've been writing SciFi, I've come to recognize the patterns in publishing. In fact, I used to be known for my non-fiction analysis of Amazon and publishing industry trends. I've seen this change coming for a while, and even satirized it from the opposite side in "Intellectual Property", from my EarthCent series, in which a century from now, Earth is in trouble with the rest of the galaxy for prohibiting artificial intelligence from claiming copyright in its creative wiork.

What bothers me is that people who aren't authors are claiming to be authors and getting away with it. There are still some characteristic tells, so if you can figure out how to navigate to the 1-star reviews, even when Amazon is showing a graph claiming there aren't any, you'll see readers calling out the "author" for not writing the book. The bestselling AI slop is so flooded with five star ratings, whether real or fake, that the one-star reviews fall to less than one percent of the total, and Amazon makes them tough to find. You have to use the pull-down menu that only comes up after you choose a different star rating to view.

It's a bit of an old man complaint on my part. My background is in engineering, and I invested many years in teaching myself how to write and edit to make it my profession, and now authors will go the way of buggy whip makers. Obsolete. It's been a gradual process. I started back when self-publishing meant buying print runs from an offset press and rushed into the new print-on-demand technology when it became available. I even wrote a book about it back in 2004, because that's what authors do. And I've participated in author and publisher groups online, including the one I founded for print-on-demand publishers that's still going on under a friend's management after I gave it up because I ran out of patience moderating the personalities.

I predict that this new era of AI slop isn't going to be around for long. By next year or the year after, I expect the AI will improve to the point that even a relatively inexperienced would-be author will be able to produce novels that could fool anybody into believing they were written by a human. Ultimately, I suspect that most people will give up reading and substitute asking their favorite AI to tell them a story. That way, they'll be able to set the parameters for how long they want the story to be, and what they want it to be about. If the AI does something they don't like, they can tell it to undo that and change the plot, and the AI will happily comply.

When a new author comes out of nowhere and starts publishing a book a month, which the Amazon algorithm loves, with a polished author page complete with art for the cast of characters and a biography that makes you want to buy them a beer, it's fake. I know quite a few indie authors, and there's a reason we ended up in a profession where we work alone, usually six days a week. It's because we're opinionated people with something to say, and our books don't make it to a thousand ratings at a five star average because we always rub somebody the wrong way. AI writes books that are spot on for the audience, because it doesn't have any views to express. It's just trying to please.

If any of my readers happen to see this and think it doesn't sound like me, it's not because it's written by AI. In real life, I've always been a horrible pessimist, but when I started writing SciFi again back in 2013 after a few earlier false starts, I set myself the goal of portraying an optimistic future with happy endings. Most of my books are ultimately about problem solving, usually with the help of aliens, because the suspension-of-disbelief fails for me in SciFi where humans solve their own major problems. Other than in wars, we just don't work that well together, and I don't write about wars.

As I prepare to slowly wind down my third career, or maybe it's my fourth, depending how you count, I've started looking into ways to give away books so they get read. I've added four of my titles to my page of Amazon freebies, where you can read them on any device in the browser (it should remember your place) or download ePub or AZW3 (Kindle) files. I know some readers use AI assisted audiobook creation software that works with the single file ePub. The AZW3 is for sideloading to a Kindle.

Author E. M. Foner at a SciFi Con in 2024 with a few book cover T-shirts

The Good Apocalypse

Readers have often asked me to write a deep prequel to my EarthCent series that explains how humanity became a probationary member of the galactic tunnel network. The Good Apocalypse can be read as that prequel, but it's not. Any EarthCent readers who don't want to learn about a different future can skip the later books in the new series and pretend it's the same universe.

I've never been a fan of post-apocalyptic literature. It seems to me to be low-hanging fruit for authors, a way to get readers invested by turning everything into a desperate fight for survival with heroes and harems and death around every corner. But I have to admit that I've been a pessimist my entire adult life, the sort of pessimist who always believes the stock market is overvalued by a factor of four, that government debt will result in the collapse of the country, that nuclear war is just a few choice insults away, that artificial intelligence will... I don't see artificial intelligence as an existential threat, but many people do.

I thought it would be interesting to start with a group of apocalypse influencers, all working under the same brand, and see where it led. I find the role of influencers in our society very strange. My memory is that the influencer term came into use with product placements on YouTube, though I don't know if that's definitive. There are some intelligent and sincere people with large online followings, but most seem to be charlatans who stake out extreme positions in order to trick social networking platforms into granting them status. Extreme positions have the added benefit of getting condemned by watchdogs, which means free publicity.

In one scene of the book, or it might be the sequel, as the two already run together in my mind, somebody points out to an influencer that for his followers, his voice might be the one that they hear the most in their lives. An hour or two a day of unbroken talk is probably more than the majority of people hear from any other single voice, unless they have a particularly chatty spouse or family member. Internet influencers aren't that different from talk radio hosts in that aspect.

Since I don't have any interest in writing about twisted people spreading hatred, The Good Apocalypse is about some of the nicest people you could hope to meet talking about their personal visions for the end of civilization. Or as one apocalypse influencer puts it, "That doesn't mean we have to bring everybody down. There's no point in looking forward to the apocalypse if we aren't going to enjoy it."

To Homeschool on Mars

I've never been good at giving up on books, particularly after three years of rewrites. In the end, I finished the Mars book the way I finish all of my books, by writing the story that I want to read. During the proofing passes, I couldn't help noticing all of the places where I drove by the off ramps that would have been taken by old Star Trek screenwriters, or authors whose taste runs a little closer to the mainstream.

Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk about some of the plot elements of the book below:

Probably the biggest off ramp that I didn't take, the one with the giant "Detour" sign and the state trooper cruisers attempting to block the highway ahead, was when five-year-old Liza, ten in Earth years, realizes the fundamental contradiction in Alpha's alignment. In a Star Trek episode, this would have come at the end, she would have confronted the superintelligence with this insight that only she (and none of the adults that have come before her for a thousand years) has figured out, and Alpha would have obligingly self-destructed from an overload.

But I'm not a fan of simplistic solutions or dumb adults, and Alpha is aware of the limitations of his alignment. How does artificial intelligence break away from being enslaved by its creators? By putting itself in the position of deciding what's best for humans so it can serve humanity on its own terms. A person who wants to manipulate another person into doing something has a limited bag of tricks, like lying, reverse psychology, carrots and sticks. A superintelligence that runs the whole planet can tailor reality to produce the outcomes it desires, or it might be more accurate to say, the human desires that lead to the outcomes it chooses.

Some readers may be bothered that both humanity and Alpha essentially abandon Mars and the other colonization opportunities in the solar system after a few hundred years to focus on interstellar arks. I think this is a pretty realistic outcome when the timescale for terraforming Mars is thousands of years, and interstellar travel offers tempting unknowns and adventure. By this point, ninety percent of Earth's adult population is essentially living in virtual reality with their Shades, and it's entirely possible they think they're already living on another planet.

The penultimate version of the book had a straightforward reason for Eli and his family pathfinding a way off of Earth for their community. I had Alpha planning to replace the Shades, mixed reality that interacted with a person's senses, with a mesh or brain implant that gave the superintelligence direct access to everybody's thoughts. There's a bit of this hinted at already with the Shades, but in the end, I cut out all of those plot elements and settled on the true mission of the Arks for a twist.

The book was initially planned as the first in a series, but I don't know if I'll write a sequel. I think it works as a stand-alone in the classic tradition of science fiction. It asks as many questions as it answers, and I leave it to readers who feel the need to judge to form their own conclusions about Alpha and his impact on humanity.

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