rznicolet

I really enjoyed The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott. The depth of the worldbuilding is a delight, and the vibes are exquisite -- it feels amazingly real, full of history and old traditions and cultures. It's a little slow for a modern novel (which I don't mind); it reminded me of an older book, in terms of quality (The Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh) that I also loved. It's the first book in a duology, so I really need to get my hands on the second book.

As to the story: to protect herself and her nephew from a local lord with an ugly grudge, a courier gets sucked into helping an obnoxious prince take a dangerous route to bypass an avalanche and deal with an urgent, secret mission. The mission gets complicated when said prince ends up possessed by a haunt from ancient ruins; and of course, the courier has her own secret to keep...

Alas, at present, AI mostly serves to fill my email folder with vapid praise that clumsily restates the back-of-the-book blurb and then tries to get me to give someone else money for dubious (nonexistent) marketing services.

We're already at the point where, for the vast majority of novelists (which is where I'm most knowledgeable), writing is not a primary source of income. With the exception of the very few bestsellers who are super-famous, most have other jobs or a spouse to provide income (and, in the US, health insurance). So most authors aren't doing it only for the money.

It's also hard to imagine a situation where authors are paid when AI ingests or remixes their work; this is already not the case. Legal cases have slapped down _piracy_, but it seems that _training_ is considered fair use, so long as the AI company buys at least one copy of the book.

There's no reason for the AI companies to bother paying anyone for their work.

But let's ignore all of that.

I write so I can tell the story. I write so other people can enjoy it -- so I can gross them out, or shock them with a clever plot twist they should've seen coming, or make them think about something differently, or let them have a moment of heartwarming joy, or just escape into a wild adventure of my own imagining. Otherwise, I'd just say "Odysseus had a long trip home" and be done.

If nobody reads my book unless it's been processed by an AI and mashed up with the writing of others... then nobody's actually reading _my_ book, and I see no purpose to throwing my work into the grinder.

Disclosure: I write novels, have one published, and plan to publish more, but I very much do not make a living off of them. Most of the (unlikely) futures in which I rely on writing income alone assume massive savings from my current tech job.

Never. In fact, the annoyances of the occasional helpful "Are you trying to use Siri?" pop-up motivated me to turn it off.

Yeah, I expect the tidal forces and whatnot are, shall we say, not negligible in practice.

It's even funnier that, at least around here, one of the biggest crime problems is people stealing copper wiring... from streetlights...

Small counterpoint to your analogy, as someone who studied astrophysics: I actually did have a requirement to understand general relativity! Deriving all of it independently from scratch wasn't something we did, but there _were_ derivations involved. And it was definitely worth working through -- it _is_ a good tool for understanding. (I've long since left the field, but I don't regret the work I did.)

In which I expound on a very petty complaint about fictional wormholes.