Sean Michaels Writes an Unabashedly AI-assisted, Very Good Novel

There's been a lot in the news these last days about Artificial Intelligence as people who know what's going on in the industry send out alarms of a looming apocalypse.  At the same time, the people who make books are trying to use AI to streamline production and/or weed out AI slop from the projects submitted to them. 

So this week, I decided to look at a recent novel whose author, Sean Michaels, unabashedly used AI to write bits of it.  Do You Remember Being Born?

, published in 2023 by Random House Canada, is the story of Marian ffarmer, a  celebrated, somewhat elderly poet who is enlisted by a tech company to write a work of poetry with Charlotte, a precursor to ChatGPT, Claude and friends.  She takes the assignment partly because she'd like to help her middle-aged son buy a house- -the collaboration comes with a handsome honorarium--and partly out of curiosity.  Michaels acutely observes the world of high tech, and also provocatively raises questions about what is art, and who can make it.  The result is a lively and sometimes touching tale, cleverly told.

Note that Michaels started working on the novel years before the present controversy.  He saw the dangers and possibilities in AI long before most people outside the world of those constructing Large Language Models did.  He is cagey about whether the poem Marian and Charlotte write is of any value.  In addition, he allows a suspicion that maybe Charlotte is not a chatbot but a real person.    

I was able to ask him about that last possibility when I was preparing to talk about the book in one of the discussion groups I've led in libraries.  His reply: ".. I'm afraid that's a question meant for you to answer yourself. For me to do so would be cheating." 

 

A man of honour, perhaps! 

 As for the prospect of an AI catastrophe and the end of civilization, that question has been around for a long time, although the voices warning against such a fate are becoming more and more strident.  I spent the last several years worrying about it: the result is my recent book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years (Dundurn Press).  My conclusion?  Collective wisdom will be a powerful tool as civilizations attempt to overcome the major upheavals ahead.

 

 

The Hole in the Middle of the Story

This summer I read two page-turners, novels that sucked me in and kept me reading late into the night.  One is Cailin Mullen's Heather, which could be classed as a police procedural in which a young woman chief of police in a small New Jersey town tries to revive a cold case and unravel mysteries about her own life.  The other is The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali and set a world away in Tehran with the Iranian Revolution of the 1950s roaring in the background.

 

Aside from the fact that both novels have strong women as the anchor character, at first glance the two  books seem to have little in common.  The Stationery Shop is a love story which goes off its rails when tension mount as a society comes apart.  The heroine doesn't learn why she was jilted until 60 years and several hundred pages later.  Heather, however, from the beginning is a mystery and while there's a lot of sex in it, there's relatively little love. 

 

The stories, however, share a characteristic that isn't immediately obvious. The resolution of the mysteries, the explanation of what has happened in both cases depends on a woman who is able to rise from terrible circumstances to a position of comfort if not plenty.  Bully for them, I'd say, it weren't for the great hole this leaves in the plot. Of course, in both cases the story is told so skilfully that you don't notice the problem until you've finished reading the book.  Then you begin to wonder: how did this happen?

 

This secondary mystery may not bother you.  If you're happy to take a story as presented and not wonder too much about loose ends, I'd recommend both books as good reads.  But for me the lack of information about the woman who overcomes great odds is deal breaker.  No amount of captivating detail and harrowing suspense can make the books anything more than second rate.

 

A Month in the Country: An English Pastoral with Long Shadows

  

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

 

This week's selection is a direct follow-up of Orbital, Samantha Harvey's space pastoral.  As I noted earlier, she said J.L. Carr's book A Month in the Country inspired her to write a tale in which no dramatic events take place, but  where context and climate are all important.

 

Carr writes in the first person from the point of view of Tom Birkin, badly damaged by World War I, who had trained as an art

restorer and finds himself cleaning up a mural in a village church in England during the month of August 1920.  I suspect that I found the book particularly pleasing because his evocation of wonderful summer weather rhymed with what we have been experiencing: not too hot, enough rain to keep things fairly green, sweet smells of growing things all around.   I also had an afternoon and evening free to indulge in reading, which allowed me to float along on the river of Carr's words.

 

But even without the weather cooperating, I think I would have delighted in the book, which is seemingly such a simple story.  There are threats in the shadows.  We do not learn what exactly happened in the War which left the man with an uncontrollable twitch to his face, and memories that he would is trying to repress.  Similarly, there is the mystery of the gorgeous mural that he is cleaning, which turns out to be a painting by a Master, not an ordinary itinerant painter.  Is there a connection between it and the grave that another ex-soldier, now an archeologist, is supposed to be looking for?

 

Then there is the name of the woman who left the money to clean the mural and find the grave: Hebron.  FamillySearch says that it is a name from Northumberland, possibly from "from Old English hēah ‘high’ + byrgen ‘burial place, tumulus’."  But there are other Hebrons in this world, and possibly therein lies a good part of the tale.