For those who wish to explore the relationship between Homer, the Bronze Age, and the archaeological record—and to understand why the distance between them matters to anyone who writes in that world. A historical novelist working in the Bronze Age Aegean faces a problem no amount of imagination alone can solve: the world he is […]
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On the distance between The Iliad and The Odyssey and what archaeology reveals—and why a historical novelist must navigate between them. Every reader who comes to Bronze Age historical fiction arrives carrying Homer. The wine-dark sea, the rage of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus are the furniture of the Western imagination when it turns toward
On antagonists who operate from a coherent internal logic and whether historical fiction can afford a pure villain. There is a kind of antagonist who appears in lesser historical fiction with reassuring frequency: the man who enjoys being cruel, who oppresses because oppression pleases him, whose motives require no further excavation, as the author has
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Six novels this month—two Brazilian, four from the European tradition—all concerned with what society does to people who fall outside its sanctioned arrangements. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (1891), Thomas Hardy Tess Durbeyfield is a farmer’s daughter whose family, learning of a distant, probably fictional connection to the ancient d’Urberville name, sends
Why Does AI Writing Need Everything to Be Settled Before It Will Stop? This is Essay 22 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. There is
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Why Does AI Writing Give Its Characters Lines Instead of Voices? This is Essay 21 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. There is a kind
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Why Does AI Writing Give Its Characters Lines Instead of Voices? This is Essay 20 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Test There is
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Dialogue That Reports Rather Than Reveals Read More »
Why Does AI Writing Produce Places That Could Be Anywhere? This is Essay 19 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Backdrop That Is Not
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Why Does AI Prose Manufacture Tension It Has No Intention of Honoring? This is Essay 18 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Obstacle That Exists
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Why Does AI Prose Forget That People Have Bodies? This is Essay 17 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Sensory Void There is a kind
