Failed Writers Journey: You Got Your Imitative Politics in My AI Writing

Been a while since I did one of these, huh?

Been a bit behind with family and work and travel, and I haven’t had much but rejections to discuss, and rejections are boring. But now, as that terrible headline shows, there is Discourse. And how can I resist Discourse?

The discourse starts with another round of “writers are just lying about not using AI” stories. This is fundamentally bullshit. Now, it is entirely possible that writers are using AI in the sense that grammar checkers and Google searches use some version of AI, imitative or otherwise. But the people driving these stories are obviously trying to say that the majority of writers are using AI to, well, write. This is inevitably followed by an assertion that writing is hard and that the use of imitative AI makes a writer more efficient. Which is the dead giveaway that they don’t actually know any writers.

Writers write because they like to write. The process is the point. Yes, of course, everyone would love it if what they write is widely read, but most people understand that is not likely and they write anyway. The result isn’t the point; the process is. Just like every other hobby. Know what else is fun? Playing catch with my kids. But no one, not even the White Sox, is going to offer me a try out contract. Should I have stopped? No one will ever mistake me for a professional basketball player, but I played pick up games for years. Was that a mistake? My origami isn’t ever going to be hung in a museum. Am I foolish for indulging in the work? Of course not. Life is to be enjoyed. It is not a contest, and if you think it is, I would suggest your are doing it wrong.

But the people pushing this do think life is a contest. Or, at least, they would profit if everyone else thought life was a contest. They need people to think that the use of imitative AI in every field is inevitable, because unless it really is picked up in every field they will never make their money back. By convincing people that imitative AI is inevitable everywhere, they are trying to shape the world in favor of their. These assertions are a kind of political project, one in service of saving the economic bacon of the assertors.

And that brings us the Andy Weir.

For those who do not know, Andy Weir is the author of two books, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that have been turned into movies. Project Hail Mary is in theaters now (and I hear it is good, but have yet to see it) and so Weir is doing press. In one of the interviews, he stated that he didn’t like social commentary in his books or shows, and that the new Star Trek’s weren’t as good as the old shows because the old shows didn’t have politics. For those of you that never watched Star Trek, liberal politics were at their heart from the original series on. Weir is either lying or incapable of seeing what is right in front of his own face, even his own books.

Star Trek has always been progressive in its politics. It has always been focused on professionals trying to learn about the world and focused on how jaw-jaw is better than war-war. The original show even had the first interracial kiss on television. Weir may just be lying here. He might be trying to suck up to MAGA adjacent audiences in order to avoid the pile-on that other sci-fi properties have suffered anytime their cast looks less white than printing people. He may be MAGA adjacent and simply speaking the language of his tribe. He might, however, simply not recognize politics as politics because he agrees with the politics in the works he likes..

I don’t think Weir is a racist, so the interracial kiss would not seem important or out of the ordinary to someone his age. I think that, generally, people of Weir’s generation would have been raised to think that war is usually bad and destructive and that diplomacy has value. Since Star trek reflects back his own values, to at least a certain extent, he doesn’t recognize the politics in them. I think this is a likely explanation, since he also says that he doesn’t have social politics or social messaging in his books. He is absolutely wrong about that.

I cannot speak to Project Hail Mary as I have neither read it nor seen the movie. But I did do both for The Martian. And that book has a ton of politics. It is the story of a person who survives on Mars after being accidentally left behind. He does so using the tools provided by the government and is ultimately rescued by an international project, with China and the US both sacrificing their short-term goals in order to rescue one man. It is a clear story about the value of government science, cooperation, and diplomacy. Because Weir thinks those things are good, he doesn’t understand how political they can be. Others find privatization, corporate science, and great power competition better and so would find his work “political”. Weir doesn’t keep social commentary out of his books, he just doesn’t understand that he cannot recognize such commentary when he agrees with it.

All good fiction has some level of political or social commentary embedded in it. Good fiction is a reflection of human opinion and human emotions and human structures. Society and politics inform all of those, and so all good fiction has some element of commentary on those human creations. Weir’s work is good, and so it embeds his assumptions about what is good and valuable in those human structures. But not everyone will agree with Weir’s judgment about what is good in humanity. Those readers will understand the politics and social commentary in his books, even if Weir doesn’t.

Weir doesn’t want politics kept out of his art. He just doesn’t want to be confronted with the idea that not everyone agrees with his politics.

Weekly Word Count

Okay, been a bit more than a week. I have a few thousand words of revisions and new work. I am working on a story about rich parents cloning their kids to help them survive school shootings. Mikey 7 meets the school shooting generation. But I have also been a little obsessed with another idea.

Portal fantasies — where modern people go to a fantasy world or alternate reality — almost always have a story focused on helping the Good King retain or get back their throne. How come the modern Americans in these stories never remember that No Kings is their national creed? So now I am obsessed with a portal fantasy where at least one of the people transported to the land is a committed democrat, intent on establishing a republic in Narnia. Almost certainly my least commercial idea, which is saying something. But I keep thinking about it. Which means I will likely have to finish it. Ah, well. No one makes money in fiction anyway.

Have a great weekend, everyone.