I am an addict, but a healthy one. One of my addictions is reading — every night when I go to bed, I have to spend an hour reading a book, just to settle my brain and redirect it away from constantly fussing over the work I’ll need to do. I try to vary the subjects: so one recent book was Silent Spring, which was a mistake, since it was way too close to my work, and another was The Demon of Unrest, but sometimes I just want some lazy trash, and Kindle Unlimited has been a great source of all kinds of interesting variety. Until lately.
When I look at the Kindle Unlimited offerings, this is what I see:
Do you detect a theme? I get screens full of boobs, crotch shots, and presumably seductive poses. It’s gotten ridiculous, and it’s gotten worse. The Amazon AI knows I enjoy a good SF novel, and to the Amazon AI, that means bosoms. Lots of big, pillowy bosoms everywhere…and most of this cover art is probably generated by an AI somewhere. There was nothing that interested me anywhere.
I had a wild thought that maybe the covers aren’t indicative of the content — maybe it’s the easy availability of cheap AI-generated art has led to writers throwing provocative covers on their work, but that there’s actually some good writing underneath. I made the mistake of downloading a random couple of these things.
No, there isn’t any good writing there. It’s all cheesy, formulaic, stupid shit. I skimmed one that was purportedly about a guy who found a gadget that allowed him to travel back in time to the early 19th century, which has potential for a good story and maybe some interesting stuff about history. Unfortunately, the extent of the history was the author (and his proxy, the protagonist) congratulating themselves on being smarter than those stuffy ivory-tower academics because he knew that the War of 1812 was fought in this period. Did he explore any details of that war? No. What got him enthused about time-traveling was the opportunity to get laid with a busty daughter of a minor politician. Thus, the cover.
What’s worse is that so many of these books are part of a series — sometimes 15,20 books long — that go on and on repetitively, never actually exploring the SF topic they nominally introduce. There are apparently people who consider themselves authors who churn out klunky dialog and interminable “stories” that are all wrapped around unimaginative sex acts, and seem to be written by and for genuinely stupid men. And they’ve driven out all the interesting stuff! (Be warned, though: download one of these trash books, and Amazon will try to feed you even more.) There are good books sprinkled in there, but they’re drowning in all the hackery.
You know we’ve got a guy on this network, William Brinkman, who is trying to make a living writing and marketing through Amazon, and I can’t imagine how tough it is to get noticed while swimming through that morass. He doesn’t succumb to the temptation of lurid cover art or an endless series of books chummed out with minimal effort. He’s also got a book on Kindle Unlimited, A Fire in the Shadows. I may have to stick to familiar authors, rather than exploring new authors, because the hacks have taken over, and that’s
a real shame.
The lesson: You can tell a book by the cover. Also, you get what you pay for.
Speaking of books, PZ, did you ever read the one I sent you a few months ago, Cultural Practices of the Heartland? It’s a sci-fi-ish political satire.
AI generated art, and now AI generated content, which is why it all seems so formulaic and repetitive.
I don’t think you can always tell a book from its cover but clearly sometimes some covers can tell you abook is very likely rubbish..
Until the rhythemic algae figure out that people have figured that out – if & when enough of them do.
@brucej: I know. I used to wonder how John Ringo and David Weber managed formulaic and repetitive without AI and then I remembered Doc Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Norman and Don Pendleton and now I remind myself that eventually AI beat humans at chess and eventually the market for formulaic and repetitive will be dominated by our large language model overlords.
I’m currently reading Wayward by Chuck Wendig. It’s a sequel to Wanderers.
He pushes my buttons.
One thing that really annoyed me for a while was mobile game ads that were much like this. Probably still are, but I don’t see them because my ad blockers work. Particularly creepy was one that about being a king and abusing your power to get women. It’s just insulting to experience.
Remember a clip of Hayao Miyazaki watching some creepy AI animation program and angrily asked what the creator’s goal was: To make an AI that can animate stuff like a human. Cut to him writing in his journal about these dark days when humanity is losing confidence in itself.
AI combined with capitalism is looking to be a leading cultural poison. It’s not up to the job, but venture capitalists just won’t accept that.
I suppose the endgame is literally books on demand. You search amazon for “sci fi stories about mech armor marines and big pillowy bosoms” and an AI quickly whips out 20 likely-sounding titles and low resolution cover art. When you click on one, it queues up an AI to do a high resolution cover art, and a description teaser and likely-sounding author name and bio. If you choose to download it, there is a brief pause while GPT12 turns the teaser into a polished 200-230 page masterpiece of pillowy mech armor and fire-spitting bosoms. At that point “book store” is replaced with an implied space that is fractally detailed, overlaid with a statistically generated clade tree of popularity. Naturally, the popularity map will grow distorted by the actions of AIs programmed to act like fans and readers so they can upvote the Hugo nominees their masters preferred. Then, when humanity dies out, the whole ecosystem will stagger along, growing more pillowy and bosomy until the power cuts off and there is only silence.
Ever just shop for actual old books in old – or new or present day- bookshops?
Pretty good value usually I’ve found,.. Albeit you still get some crappy covers flogging crappy books but then Stugeons Law applies. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law )
Do Kindle books with those covers come with blurbs on rhe back like old style paper ones?
Maybe…just maybe…the writing is AI generated and the cover art is done by an actual human. Or, both isn’t out of the ream of possibility. I did a search for “AI generated artwork” and I got some faces, but almost no Sci-Fi cover shlock, tho I’m sure it can be done.
Here’s something AI is doing that isn’t boobs, bad writing or screwing up democracy—the Vesuvius Challenge: Three Students Just Deciphered the First Passages of a 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Burned in Vesuvius’ Eruption. There are a fairly large number of folks involved in the project.
One of the principles behind the Vesuvius Challenge is Nat Friedman, former CEO at GitHub (serious geek cred) before Microsoft bought it. Friedman is also involved in a project called California YIMBY (“yes in my back yard”) to address the housing shortage here. One of their ideas is to build a “city of the future” in Solano county which they’ve been kicking around for a while (from at least 2024). I have some friends who live in Solano and they say the idea isn’t moving very fast, has few details, and may get killed at the voting booth next November.
AI is new so it is ripe for exploitation. I believe it happens with every technology. But gradually, people will understand the advantages and the limitations and the hype will die down. Case in point, a few years ago people call AI generated pictures amazing, high quality, cool, real and so on. Now, they are associated with adjectives like low effort, spammy, cringe, fake, and so on. People adapt and those who don’t eventually die off.
#7: I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already there. That’s the endgame, though: Amazon no longer sells books, they generate them on demand. No more paying authors for anything!
I also agree: a lot of the old pulp fiction was repetitive crap without an AI behind it.
As an antidote/palate cleanser, I recommend you revisit Iain Banks’ Culture novels.
And don’t forget William Gibson’s latest two novels Peripheral and Agency .
Neal Asher is a bit more adventure-oriented thsn Banks but his novels about the Polity and its people – human, AI, cyborg or alien- is far more interesting than the formulaic junk that is everywhere.
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For TV/film about heroic fantasy, try the animated “Frieren; After Journeys End” a really excellent drama about relationships (with plenty of battles depicted in retrospective).
A recurring comment about Frieren is, it succeded where the high-budget Lord Of The Rings TV series failed.
OT but not by too much.
Scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge died at 79.
He was one of my favorite authors and wrote some amazing novels and short stories that were definitely not pulp fiction.
The Singularity is a bit shall we say, speculative, but so are time machines, faster than light drives, Galactic empires, and UFO aliens.
I can enthusiastically recommend books written by Peter F. Hamilton for sci-fi enjoyment.
Thanks for the mention, PZ. One correction. I am not in Kindle Unlimited, but I am on Kindle. A book has to be exclusive to Amazon to be in KU, and I will not restrict myself to only Amazon. I don’t like the idea of being trapped in the Amazon ecosystem, and I don’t want to say no to the person who buys their eBooks on Kobo.
Initially, KU encouraged series because an author would only get paid if a reader checked out a book and read at least 10%. That meant it would take longer for authors to get paid for books with high page counts. So some authors would break up a longer book into a series so they could get paid faster. Then Amazon switched to a pay per page read model, which encourages authors to come up with ways to encourage readers to read more pages.
As for covers, there’s pressure for authors to have the covers match genre expectations. Covers like the ones PZ showed are the lazy way to do that. Authors can commission better covers without resorting to sexism, and many do better than that. I tell my cover designers not to go down that route.
If you’re looking for a service similar to KU, I can recommend a couple. Kobo Plus is cheaper, includes audiobooks, and authors aren’t chained to the platform. Many libraries use apps like Libby, to let patrons checkout eBooks and audiobooks. They’re usually included as part of a library membership. If they don’t have the book you want, you can ask them to add it.
Another alternative to Amazon for print books is Bookstore.org. A portion of each sale either goes towards a local bookstore of your choice, or to a general fund that helps bookstores.
While we are on about recommendations, I’ll have to second Iain Banks and the Culture, Neal Asher and the Polity, and Peter Hamilton.
Don’t forget Stross and the Laundry novels.
Add Alastair Reynolds, David Brin, Connie Willis, Seanan McGuire, Daryl Gregory, Ian McDonald, and more than a few others.
I usually choose fiction book by favorite author.
Time is limited and taking a chance on an unknown to me author often leads nowhere.
I do a few a year since my favorites keep dying off.
Also read a lot of short story anthologies I get from the library.
Currently reading Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds, the latest Prefect Dreyfess novel and enjoying it very much. Reynolds is one of the authors I will automatically read anything they write, the other being Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Creationists will have no trouble with creating AI art for their crappy “science.” These two crapolas seems to go together like peanut butter and jelly.
I also use Kindle Unlimited to read mainly speculative fiction, in particular litRPG, Gamelit, Progression and Cultivation fantasies. Among them I like isekai (portal fantasy), system apocalypse/post-apocalypse, and some military SF. If a cover has a “sexy” woman on it, it’s likely a harem story. I mostly don’t care for these, though a couple of writers are (barely) okay.
Authors and series I have enjoyed or am enjoying (because they haven’t been finished), which are all available on KU and broadly fit the above categories:
Tao Wong, Thousand Li
JF Brink, Defiance of the Fall
Shirtaloon/Travis Deverell, He Who Fights Monsters
Matt Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl
Nicoli Gonnella, Unbound
Daniel Schinhofen, Aether’s Revival (harem)
Zogarth, Primal Hunter
JM Clarke, Mark of the Fool
SunriseCV, System Universe
CMantis, Path of Ascension
Joel Shepherd, Spiral Wars
Alex Maher, The Hedge Wizard
Kerberos, A Summoner Awakens
Rhaegar, Azarinth Healer
Wil Wright, Cradle (I loved this series until I didn’t, around book 10, but it’s very popular)
The nice thing about Kindle Unlimited is that you can try books out to see if you really like them or not without having to buy them. These were all series which I really like/liked.
I trawl my library for sci-fi and fantasy books to download, and I like stories with strong, badass female characters. Unfortunately there is an author, Michael Anderle, who floods the market with scores of titles, possibly hundreds. Some with only his name, others where he lends his publishing machinery to other authors for a co-credit. His books follow a formula introducing the strong female character on the cover art, demonstrating her tough, no-nonsense attitude, right up until she meets the hyper-masculine male lead of the story, at which point she becomes submissive arm-candy from that point onward. He really has the cover art trap honed to a fine edge. It’s beyond annoying. I’m 95% certain he uses AI to churn out such a high volume of formulaic crap. I don’t see how one person could physically put that many words in print otherwise.
If you’re interested, you can learn more about my books at bolingbrookbabbler.com. I have an Urban Fantasy/Sci-Fi series, and each book has a complete story. I hate the idea of taking a single story.
My book, A Fire in the Shadows, is up for two Indieverse awards, and there are other great nominated authors. So if you want stories that AIs can’t spit out, check out the nominees at http://www.indieverseawards.com.
#15: You’re not on Kindle Unlimited? But I picked up A Fire in the Shadows for free on Kindle Unlimited!
I have no idea how that program works.
A couple of names, in case you aren’t aware of them: Naomi Novik, Django Wexler. Both known for long series, the Temeraire books and the Thousand Names books, among other things.
For decent cover art of a book with a female protagonist: https://www.amazon.com/Point-Honor-Dorothy-J-Heydt/dp/0886777917
Society has descended into full ‘Panem et circenses’ mode. All trashy style and no substance. What PZ illustrated is one small indicator of that.
@6 Bronze Dog made a good underlying point with ‘AI combined with capitalism is looking to be a leading cultural poison. It’s not up to the job, but venture capitalists just won’t accept that.’
I add: most of social media is poison.
@8 SteveoR importantly reminds us of Sturgeon’s Law which is even more pertinent today.
And, it is sad that, to avoid being a victim of the ‘Kindle Unlimited’ crap, a real author like William Brinkman has to resort to the massive abuse of AMAZ0N. Our organization had to pull our books from the internet about 20 years ago when G00GLE and AMAZ0N were stealing everything they could get their hands on. Now, AI is doing the same pillaging of the intellectual property of others.
We’ll see if I need to continue wearing my anti-troll armor. Thankfully, it wasn’t needed the other day.
As I visited some news sites I just found this which expands my points above: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/generative-ai-could-leave-users-holding-the-bag-for-copyright-violations.html
May I suggest the Murder Bot series. It’s about a rouge android that would rather watch soap operas then kill people. Though it fast forwards through the sex scenes as it doesn’t have any genitalia and finds them boring. Also if you threaten anyone it has feels it has an obligation to protect it will destroy you.
The Ancillary Justice books are quite good, I think.
@Artor#20: if you haven’t tried Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, there are some awe-inspiring female protagonists therein. “I went shopping in the capital…” brr… woot. Shards of Honor and Barrayar.
And by the way, if your tastes are more inclined towards really bad covers, but done by humans, gitcher candy here:
https://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/
awesome, old-style stuff.
We don’t need no AIs to come up with horrible pictures!
Might I suggest Blindsight by Peter Watts.
I’ll second Murderbot — really fun series. Soft sci-fi that’s very character-based. It’s just lots of fun to be in the title character’s head.
One more suggestion. While not for everyone, the semi-monthly magazines Analog (science fiction and fact) and Asimov’s have a wide range of science fiction, fact articles and a few fantasy-leaning stories. They have included some very well respected authors over the years. Thousands of people (including me) have been subscribing to them for over 75 years. It is inexpensive to sign up for 1 year to test them. (And, no, I don’t derive any benefit financial or otherwise by mentioning them.)
This reminds me of the original edition of Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty, the cover art for which features a buxom white woman piloting a spacecraft – while the text centers on a lanky black woman. (TBP and its sequelae, Seasons of Plenty and Mother of Plenty, are good, original, but quite noir sf – highly recommended though probably hard to find.)
AI-generated art is suitable for posters, pulp fiction book covers, and T-shirts. And maybe wallpaper.
It’s corrosive to actual art, demeans artists, and hastens the erosion of public intellect.
@Bronze Dog
It’s especially fun being a trans woman being interested in trans women’s community stuff online because the algorithm sees ‘trans woman” and just thinks “porn” so I get all sorts of fun ads if i don’t have an add blocker.
A fan of the Quicker series. (What can I say? I like science fantasy). Also, look at Missy the Were Cat. And if you like Lovecraftian horror, take a look at Widdershins. It has everything, from horrible monsters to despicable cabals, to a homo graphic pot-boiler.
Robert, https://www.widdershinscomic.com/ ?
Not bad.
@8 and @25– By today’s standards, Sturgeon was an optimist.
I’ve never quite got why so many people feel they want their fantasy and sci-fi to be highly sexualised. Indeed, I tend to go to those genres precisely to get away from how sexualised a lot of modern culture is, because the whole sex and relationships thing is a big, painful mess for me.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned in seeing sex as something to be kept in its own quiet little box, away from the rest of life and society at large. Not so much to be hushed up and ashamed of because it is inherently sordid, but more to be kept respectfully distant from the rest of life because it is awkward and embarrassing and potentially disruptive and harmful. If you want pornographic novels then fine, great, read those. But assuming pornography should be a necessary or expected part of other genres…? Just don’t get it.
I discovered Vernor Vinge in 1977, through his short story “Long Shot” (ca.1972). I will miss him.
Raven @ 16 Yes, Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds.
The Great North Road is one of Hamilton’s best.
The Murderbot series, I forgot about that, very strongly recommended. The novels are short but absolute gems.
birgerjohansson @40
I think most of the Murderbot series are novella length.
Jazzlet @ 41
Yes, I am unfamiliar with the exact definitions. BTW I bought all the titles and donated them to the local library.
birgerjohansson @42
Well it’s a blurry definition, one being between 17,000 and 40,000 words with novels being over 40,000, and novelettes being between 7,500 and 17,500 words! But when the Murderbot books were published they were described by the publisher as novellas.
Read a few thousand books and they all seem formulaic. lol
Seriously though, read a few from Anderle and didn’t mind them much, but only a few specific series (mainly the ones involving the Beaufonts, which are kind of interesting in that they all involve one family, but yeah, the main character in all of them are women). I will note that while, in these, some sort of love interest does arise, its not the core of the stories, so…
Most of the stuff I have read recently has been in from Martha Carr (I kind of wish someone would create an RPG based in her shared world), whose books are basically themed on either teams, or single characters, who are dealing with the complications involved in being in the modern world, but also having to deal with magic, and magical races. Most tend to involve the main character as one of these species, but, as I said, they also involve teams, which may include normal humans.
Then there is C.J. Archer, which I recently started reading, this is both fantasy and “period fiction”, its set in Victorian England, at the time just prior to, up to a bit after WW! and its core premise is, “What would happen if magic was real, but tended to be temporary, and the secret of its existence came out during that era?” The first series in that is Glass and Steele, and involves, literally, the main character having to deal with the old guild system trying to prevent those with magic from having businesses, and her sort of agreeing with this, but getting caught up in murders, kidnappings, and other things involving the intrigue surrounding who wants it revealed, how wants it to stay hidden, who wants to just plain stop magicians from using it at all, etc. It kind of, both due to the time period, and social norms of the time, and can be guessed from the name, does involved what comes to be a husband and wife team, but its there is real relationship conflict, disagreements, etc.
Another “shared world” that I read a fair bit of, and look forward to new books in, is almost everything by Amanda M. Lee. And, yeah, it does involve some level of, “all the heroes tend to end up involved with some sort of guy as part of the story”, but there is a fair bit of variation, even if there is a bit of similarity. The fun thing about them though is – they all literally exist in the same world. So, you get the weird Winchesters, who are witches, and cousins, who start out living with their divorced mothers in a hotel that said mothers decided to name The Overlook, and who live in a town that recently, to gain visitors and save its economy, also recast itself as “Hemlock Cove” and a witch haven. They bump up, during on the their town festivals, with the Mystic Circus, which is owned by a mage, and is filled with a whole host of supernatural types, who hunt monsters as they travel. Also, nearby is another kind of monster hunter group, who goes after things that go bump in the night, and at some point they also find themselves discovering that the Winchesters are nearby. Then there is the Reapers – i.e., literally a group that collect souls, who also get mixed up in a few other situations. And so on. Basically, like 5+ series, each entirely self contained, up to a point, then.. there are occasional cross overs, and eventually hints that some of them may just end up involved in helping each other deal with much bigger problems, that impact not just their little corner of the world.
Oh, or you can go with a different, more “real world”, but funny (and, yeah, still kind of bad girl meets boy parts to it), involving Fortune Reading – CIA operative who, during mission decided to go off mission and kill some creep, only to find herself marked for death by the guys brother, so.. her handler, to keep her safe, sends her, in disguise, to some back water town in swamp country. There she is made, almost immediately by two old ladies, who, during Nam where partners doing things that where not “officially on record”, especially since women didn’t do them – spying, and a sniper. The three end up becoming friends, and the stories basically involve, “What kind of mystery, involving a bad guy, or a murder, etc. do they get into, to the frustration of law enforcement, this week?”
But, yeah, there has been a trend, for some authors, to run themes that tend to be more sexualized. Even authors that avoid it in some books, end up doing it in others, because, frankly, like always, it sells. Can’t say I haven’t even been tempted by a few either.
As for it being AI generated art… Maybe, not is a lot of cases. Some of the books that have “same theme” covers where published long before such art was even possible, never mind capable of not giving the character on the cover three arms, or 4 fingers, or worse. Heck, one super hero series I was reading, but the author stopped publishing, was pretty good, but he was no artist, and he didn’t have any way to “pay” someone for good art (you have to remember that people need to pay someone for that, right?), so he, or someone he knew, used basically poser models, with super hero costumes, to stage covers that where obviously low quality, but it worked as cover art. As for AI written.. yeah, seen some stuff out there that I would suspect was, but can’t be, because the errors are obvious even going back to prior to when such AI was available, or even have mistakes like duplication of a whole chapter, which only happens if its human generated, the author is sort of bad at writing, and literally no one bothered to edit it before sending it to Amazon to be published. lol
Might some of the stuff now, or in the future be just AI doing it? Maybe. But, remember, 50 Shades wasn’t AI made either, and it was horrible, from all accounts I have ever seen on the subject.
I suspect that it is not to everyone’s taste, but I highly recommend the light novel series: Ascendance of a Bookworm: I Will Do Anything To Become a Librarian. A Japanese woman is reincarnated as a sickly medieval peasant in a world where only rich nobles can afford to buy books, since neither printing nor paper from trees has been invented.
Can’t recommend the World SF Bundle, curated by Lavie Tidhar, enough: https://storybundle.com/worldsf
You get six or seven books for whatever you want to donate, and in the past they’ve had about a 80 or 90% hit rate with me. Also, the World SF anthologies Tidhar’s edited are great.