Firmin, in the form of an avatar tanked up on the latest A.I., delivers her own eulogy. His name is Neil Gibson, in homage, one assumes, to the cyberpunk writers Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, even though he’s a lout and, to the best of my knowledge, Stephenson and Gibson are not.Īfter Firmin is shot and killed on a deserted bridge, shocking the literary world, a small group of people are invited to her funeral. project with a hoodie-wearing billionaire who once dated Meghan Markle. She is collaborating on an all-encompassing A.I. It’s about a well-known Canadian writer named Peggy Firmin, who vaguely resembles Margaret Atwood. Let’s not clear the calendar for “Death of an Author.” A big deal? When Jonathan Schell’s anti-nuke manifesto “ The Fate of the Earth” was published in 1982, the critic Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that Knopf should cancel the rest of its spring list in deference to it. If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel. He got it to spit out more than boilerplate, some of the time.

It has been presided over by a literate writer who has pushed the borg in twisty directions.

novel, an early glimpse at what is vectoring toward readers. But “Death of an Author” is arguably the first halfway readable A.I. In truth, other hustlers out there on Amazon already have. The book’s language, he says, is 95 percent machine-generated, somewhat like the food at a Ruby Tuesday. It’s the work of the novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who coaxed the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere, using a variety of prompts. Now comes a new novella, “Death of an Author,” a murder mystery published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. Its presence has crawled like a tumor through the spine of their other abiding freakouts. ChatGPT has given many authors a case of the dreads. It provides autofill, or something like it, on an uncanny level. The fire has been stirred under these questions thanks to the sudden arrival of sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbots, notably ChatGPT. Jorge Luis Borges made a decisive career out of recognizing, in his ficciones, the near impossibility of making original works of literature. Theodore Adorno argued that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Samuel Richardson, in the 18th century, wondered if the novel had said what it had to say. That was your human correspondent, writing on a laptop in a drafty apartment in Manhattan and advancing an argument that’s been plausibly made for centuries: that literature is dead. Those weren’t, you might have guessed, words from Siri. What’s come since has been the death rattle, and remixes of that death rattle.” The last one that mattered, closing a millennium’s loop, was probably Zadie Smith’s ‘ White Teeth,’ published in 2000. The first novel was probably Murasaki Shikibu’s ‘ Tale of Genji,’ written in the 11th century. “Since you asked, it was the subtlest form of expression known to humans.

The searcher novel