ollieollie 's review for:

Death of an Author: A Novella by Stephen Marche, Aidan Marchine

2.0

medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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It has been a while since I have read a book that has made me this upset. I will admit that I did not fully read the description and did not see the line at the very end of it about the use of AI. This book is 95% AI written. I was looking for a shorter novella audiobook that was available at my library and this was on the list. 

Before I got to the essay at the end of the book, I was already disappointed. The characters are lifeless and in many ways seem to be caricatures. We have the lonely divorced man, the difficult cranky older writer, and the tech boy trillionaire. None of these characters present with any deep motivation. Initially, Gus is trying to solve the murder because it appears that he has been framed for it but that motivation disappears

when it comes out that the police are no longer investigating it as a homicide.

His motivation for continuing to investigate it does not appear to exist and is not linked to any part of who he is as a person.

The character of Peggy has the setup to being a character I would normally enjoy, a difficult creative older woman who has made controversial choices. However throughout the story her motivations for her actions feel surface level at best and she seems to be simply a collection of character traits that are not attached to any real personality.

The mystery at the core of the story is also not engaging and the reveal of the solution is not satisfying. The events of the novel do not seem to change the main character in any way or really have any effect on him.

The writing is also disappointing, it seems to be drawing from the content of good literature without having the context that made it good in the first place. There are lines that sound like they are supposed to be meaningful, but come across more like someone writing about heartbreak who's never had their heart broken. In the afterword Stephen Marche describes the book as "compulsively readable and having beautiful moments". I would not have finished this book if I was physically reading it, rather than listening to it while working on something else.

The essay at the end of the book explains that this is an experiment in using AI to write literature, 95% of the book was written using AI. Stephen Marche, who fed the AI prompts, is trying to make an argument for the use of AI in literature. 

He tries to back this up with multiple arguments. At one point he talks about how all art is essentially inspired by other art and  that art created by AI is no different. On the surface this might seem like a reasonable argument, however I think that someone being inspired by Ursula K Le Guin for example (one of my inspirations) and out of that inspiration writing a work that delves into complex social issues is vastly different than a machine that has never existed in a social context trying to mimic that writing. Good art is often created from inspiration, but it is also created from context. For example, an AI cannot write about oppression or love in a meaningful way because it has never experienced it or had to deal with the consequences of it.

He also argues that literature is boring now and that much of what is popular in media is simply a new iteration of work that has already existed, so why shouldn't AI do the same? He points to the number of movies that are simply sequels to movies that were made decades ago. And he places the blame of boring literature squarely on the shoulders of writers. I think there are two key issues with this.

My first issue is that if you view the current state of literature as boring that tells me that you are not reading outside of the mainstream. I can point to literature that has been written recently that is brilliant, that expanded my understanding of what literature could be, that expanded my understanding of the world, and that is uniquely beautiful. For example, the works of Micaiah Johnson, James S. A. Corey, Martha Wells, and N.K. Jemisin have had a profound effect on me from the ways they made me look at the world in a new way and also the experience of reading good writing. If you think modern literature is boring you should probably examine where you are looking for your literature and who is writing it. 

My second issue with that take is that it does not consider the role that corporations play and what media is available in the mainstream. Is the issue that we have started writing and producing boring works or is the issue possibly that the corporations who fund that media are not interested in unique art? Art of any variety that is new or different is seen as a financial risk. You can know that people will pay to see a new iteration of Top Gun, but unique movies such as Everything Everywhere all at Once are risky. I believe that many people want interesting media and that the success of indie publishing shows this.

At the end of the day I think that we as a species are drawn to stories because there's something innately human about storytelling. It is how we make sense of the world and often our own lives, it is how we connect with and understand each other, and it's something that is rooted in experiencing what it is to be human. This book is soulless. There is no human element that I connected to, no struggle of the characters that I related to or wanted to understand.