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A review by ergative
The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber
3.25
I honestly don't feel right giving this book a rating. It was bonkers as heck, and a very interesting perspective into how a fed-up author with a bone to pick with the publishing industry went about picking that bone, while also smoking something quite potent. Or several somethings. Fritz Lieber is a skilled writer, though. He's struck me as much better at basic level writing than some of the other 'golden' age SFF authors, and I'm very glad to have had this peek into his psyche.
This is quite a newly relevant book, actually, in light of all the AI tosh that's flushing its way into fiction writing these days. Replace the Wordmills with LLMs, and the wordmill button pushing 'authors' with 'prompt engineers' and he basically forsaw all of this AI mess. I think in Lieber's case he was making a point about excessive editorial control leading to formulaic and repetitive writing, but his prediction was more literally true than I think he knew. I was very pleased to see the authors taking axes to smash the wordmills.
This is quite a newly relevant book, actually, in light of all the AI tosh that's flushing its way into fiction writing these days. Replace the Wordmills with LLMs, and the wordmill button pushing 'authors' with 'prompt engineers' and he basically forsaw all of this AI mess. I think in Lieber's case he was making a point about excessive editorial control leading to formulaic and repetitive writing, but his prediction was more literally true than I think he knew. I was very pleased to see the authors taking axes to smash the wordmills.