Anybody read this short story? Spoilers follow, although it’s more of a straightforward speculative piece, there’s no big twist as in many of his stories.

In the story, a man sees how powerful computers have become and wonders: if computers follow rules, and words have rules, why couldn’t computers write words?

“A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Would it not be possible, on this principle, to build a memory of almost unlimited size?”

His companion questions why anybody would want to read a story written by a computer.

“Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. And stories - well - they’re just another product. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country!”

That done, he then sets out to pay the big human authors money to never write again, and let him put their names on his stuff. But he has to be careful:

“Thereafter, Knipe wisely decided to concentrate only on mediocrity. Anything better than that - and there were so few it didn’t matter much - was apparently not quite so easy to seduce. He found that the older ones, those who were running out of ideas, were the easiest to handle. The younger people were more troublesome. They were apt to become abusive when he approached them.”

Finally:

“This last year it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were published by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.”

Uncanny stuff, eh…

Hey y’all,

Apologies for the ramble:

So recently I saw a review of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver where the reviewer criticized the book for being “torture porn” and I physically had to groan and roll my eyes. I saw a similar review for Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart by another reader.

I understand that readers can find a book relentlessly bleak or feel that its depictions of suffering are excessive but I think there is a meaningful discussion to be had between depicting suffering and using suffering as exploitation for entertainment or emotional manipulation. I also feel like calling any book that is difficult in its subject matter as “torture porn” as not only reductive, but watering down the term “torture porn” into obscurity so that it begins to feel like more of a buzzword than a legitimate criticism.

A little bit of background on me and why this review in particular bothered me: I grew up in a working-class area, where many families lived below the poverty line. While it’s no rural Appalachia, I saw a lot of similarities between my community and the one depicted in Demon Copperhead. Many of the people in my community worked blue collar jobs, in mining and logging or in the oil fields which made them particularly vulnerable to injury. It’s no surprise then, that my community was wrecked pretty badly by the drug poisoning crisis and homelessness. Growing up, it was not unusual to see police presence everywhere, ambulances lining down the street, and kids constantly going missing or ending up dead. This was particularly true for MMIWG2S (which deserves its own discussion, tbh). My experiences growing up is also what shaped my decision to become an epidemiologist, and I did my early research projects on opioid addiction and drug poisoning so that I could better use these skills to lobby for better harm reduction practices in my community and others like mine, and to address the irreparable damage caused by colonialism and systemic poverty.

This is partly why I struggle with the tendency to label fiction that depicts sustained hardship as “torture porn.” Sometimes, what readers interpret as an excessive accumulation of suffering is an attempt to portray the cumulative effects of structural violence and discrimination. Not every story needs to make suffering palatable or reassure the reader that everything will eventually improve for the better.

Obviously, I don’t think every depiction of trauma is automatically justified just because the subject matter is serious. Fiction can absolutely exploit suffering, reduce marginalized people to their trauma, or use increasingly horrific experiences as a shortcut to emotional impact. But I think that criticism requires us to examine how suffering is represented, rather than assuming that a story becomes exploitative simply because it is difficult to read.

I also wonder whether there is sometimes a disconnect between readers who encounter addiction, poverty, and systemic neglect primarily through fiction and those who have encountered these realities more directly. When suffering is unfamiliar, its persistence can feel melodramatic or implausible. When you have seen how these systems operate, the same narrative choices might feel painfully recognizable, as it did for me when reading Demon Copperhead.

I wanted to know what you guys thought. Where does one draw the line between fiction that is gruelling and raw and one that is considered torture porn?

———————

TL;DR: calling books “torture porn” simply because they depict suffering as a cornerstone in the character’s lived experience is reductive. There’s a difference between exploitation of suffering for shock value or manipulation and portraying the cumulative effects of social issues like poverty, violence, abuse, addiction, etc.

I just finished "Giovanni's Room" (James Baldwin) and am in love with this book. It was my first ever James Baldwin book and I didn't antecipate loving it this much, my second 5 star book of the year.

For those who haven't read it, the book is about David, an American man living in Paris, who falls in love with another man (Giovanni) but struggles to accept he is gay. Im not a man nor am I gay, but the book is written in such a way that I felt like I was David, living a forbidden romance in Paris. I think the descriptions of Paris' queer bar culture, the depictions of normal day to day scenes, the descriptions of people in the background... make this book feel so alive. The same with the descriptions of "Giovanni's Room", so cluttered and dirty and imperfect; but still the place David keeps coming back to. Truly an unexplainable experience.

The beautiful, slow tragedy of this book reminded me so much of my other 5-star book of the year - "Remains of the Day" (Kazuo Ishiguro). Though the plots of the books are quite different (and Remains has a unreliable narrator, which doesnt happen in Giovanni's Room), they both have protagonists reminiscing about mistakes of the past (though they're never quite sure whether or not they were mistakes). But more than this, what I think is similar in both books are the flawed protagonists. Both David and Stevens are not perfect men, they make mistakes, they regret them, they want to be something they're not too much and it ends up hurting them. And that makes the books so realistic, so relatable, so beautifully tragic.

Lastly, I want to talk about the characters in the book because I think James Baldwin deserved every award for his character-building. Every character in Giovanni's Room is someone you recognize, someone real, someone who exists in every city, in different ways. You have the creepy rich old men, who are lonely and sad and become bitter and manipulative. You have the young people with big dreams that crumble in front of them and become hopeless (or addicts or prostitutes or something else). You have women like Hella, who just want to be free, not depend on a man or on anyone, but also dont want to be lonely (and think there isnt a way to be free and not lonely). Every character is so well built, so real, so beautifully tragic. And that makes the book what it is.

I googled just now and realised Daddy Long Legs was published in 1912, which makes it even less understandable why people were lapping it up in the eighties.

Me. I am the people, me and everyone else I knew. We loved the crap out of that awful book when we were teens, and when the Japanese cartoon version hit our screens (in the nineties?) we loved it even harder. We loved Judy's descriptions of life in an American all-girl college, and her obligatory letters to the mysterious Daddy Long legs- the only payment she had to make for her otherwise free college board and tuition- were the height of whimsy and love. Wuthering Heights what? Jane Eyre who? It was all about the blossoming love of teenaged orphan Jerusha nn Judy for her rich older benefactor, Daddy Long Legs, who provided her with a free college education after plucking her out of a Dickensian orphanage, and then married her.

Barf. What was wrong with us? Why did I and my little posse of schoolfriends and our moms love this gross book so much? Why did nobody tell us that it was wrong? Why was it lying around in every house that had an old bookshelf on it somewhere?

Years and years and years later, I chose to watch the Hollywood movie of the book with my Dad as he slid into dementia, thinking the singing and dancing from his favourite actors from the fifties and sixties might cheer him up or distract up. Leslie Caron was the orphaned Jerusha, Frank Sinatra was the rich man falling in love with her -ahem- intelligence and personality. They twirled around and sang about their love. Some of Daddy Long Legs's fusty old rich-man friends huffed and puffed, in added scenes not from the book, suggesting that falling in love and marrying a teenaged orphan that he just put through college was just - not the done thing you know old chap.

Frank Sinatra poo-pood them, twirling down the stairs of the orphanage, what did they know of love, boring old men! He was in love! LOOOVVVE!

Ugh. What the fuck was wrong with us?

I am not finished with the entire book yet. I am currently at King Arthur’s coronation where Morgaine thinks the following; “If she should speak of the Beltane fires as a secret duty to the Goddess, even a Igraine, who had been reared in Avalon, would stare and think that some fiend spoke through her.”

At this point, Igraine is fully Christian and is thinking of joining the nunnery. She has completely converted and is acting as if everything she used to believe from her days as someone raised at Avalon is as foreign to her as it would be to someone born in Christianity.

Where, in the beginning of the book, she didn’t understand why the Christians thought of women as unequal and why chastity was so important to them. She didn’t like the priests, she thought they were silly and their beliefs had nothing to do with her.

Furthermore, she saw the vision of her former life, and she saw that herself and Uther were once priest and priestess of Atlantis. Not only does she know that past lives are real, that is what solidified to her that Uther was her one true love because they loved and knew each other through lifetimes.

I just don’t understand why she would abandoned the religion of Avalon so easily when she had proof that the mysteries she was taught at Avalon were real. She knew about magic, she knew that she had the Sight, she even perform magic, and then all of a sudden abandoned it all for a religion that she thought nothing of before, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that all of a sudden she adopted the morality and the prejudices of Christianity against Avalon even though she herself was raised on different beliefs. How can she suddenly believe that women are inferior to men? How can she suddenly believe that women are not supposed to play instrument and raised her voice in song? How can she all of a sudden believe that keeping the sacred rituals of Beltane is immoral and wrong?

I can understand that she feels betrayed by Avalon because she had to marry so young and was essentially cast out. I can also understand that as a queen she would convert to Christianity for political reasons. And I can also understand that she got scared when she performed the magical ritual that allowed her to warn Uther and save his life. But what I can’t understand is why her moral compass changed so drastically.

I've read a number of Ann Patchett books....and to my mind they are all wonderful. And they are all so different! The first one I read was Bel Canto and I was mesmorized and shaken. Then The Dutch House, where the house itself became like another character. Taft wasn't my favourite maybe because of the challenge of a white woman taking on the voice of a black male, but as I reflect on it I now have fond memories of it. Then State of Wonder---much of it taking place in a Brazilian jungle. And Run was touching. Truth and Beauty was a memoir about another author/poet who was her close friend and that was probably one of the most powerful true stories about a relationship that I ever read...and where Patchett reveals a lot about herself. Then her second last one (I haven't read her latest yet).....Tom Lake: how can she make a book where nothing happens so interesting? And most recently.I finall read her first novel, The Patron Saint Of Liars....Rose and Cecilia are two of the most memorable characters I've encountered in a novel. Hard to believe this was a first novel. So my question: Has she ever written anything that wasn't first rate?

Reading different discussions and reviews across various subreddits for series I've read has made me realize that readers who start a series when it's first released, and then wait months or even years between books, may experience the books very differently than some who comes to it later and can binge the entire series at once.

As someone who has only ever been in the "binge the whole series" camp, I sometimes feel like I don't have a good frame of reference for evaluating individual books on their own. The impact of a weaker entry in the series can almost be overlooked when the next book is immediately available, while long waits might amplify negative reactions and expectations.

This is especially noticeable when I come across opinions that seem widely held within a community but completely surprise me. It often makes me wonder how much of that difference comes down to the reading experience itself versus the books' actual strengths and weaknesses.

Welcome readers,

Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Thank you and enjoy!

The entire book East of Eden revolves around the idea of timshel “thou mayest”

But I think Cathy does not have a choice. Or at the very least her capacity to choose is fundamentally different from that of the other characters.

A lot of readers would agree that Cathy is a absolute sociopath . But even then they insist that she has a choice that she can simply choose to be different for example In contrast to Lee who after suffering from hate ,prejudice , trauma did not let the hate fester it soul and still chose to gentle , loving and forgiving like his father

There's a line from the book I'd like to quote:

“Some people can't see the colour green, but they don't know they can't.”

Telling Cathy that she has a choice is like telling a colour-blind person that they can choose to see green.

we are treating an incapacity as if it were a moral failure. we are assuming that everyone possesses the same internal capacities and the same freedom to exercise them.

I am not saying that every absolute sociopath is incapable of love, that all sociopath are born the same way or that a diagnosis automatically eliminates moral responmsibility.

The science is more complicated than that. But sociopathic traits can involve profound differences in emotional empathy, attachment and the capacity to experience other people's suffering in the way most people do.

I am not establishhing that every person with psychopathic traits is incapable of love or remorse. They do however challenge the assumption that everyone begins with the same emotional capacities and makes different moral choices

What if the things that make moral choice possible for other people are precisely the things Cathy lacks? What if she cannot simply will herself into experiencing emotions she has never been capable of experiencing in the same way?

What if Cathy does not expewrience the emotional world in the way that the other characters do?

What if her inability to form ordinary emotional attacvhments is not something she can simply overcome by deciding to be different?

I cannot prove that Cathy has no agency.

She is a fictional character not a clinical case, and her capacity for deliberate planning and manipulation makes the question more complicated. But I do think Steinbeck deliberately presents us with a character who challenges the moral framework through which we understand the other characters.

Perhaps Cathy is not an illustration of timshel. Perhaps she is the limit case against which we test it.

The other characters struggle with their inheritances, their desires, their capacity for cruelty, and their ability to choose differently. Cath by contrast appears to lack some of the ordinary emotional foundations through which those struggles become meaningful.

Perhaps her function in the novel is not to demonstrate that everyone can choose good or evil in the same way. Perhaps she makes us confront the possibility that the capacity for moral choice is not distributed equally even if moral responsibility remains a question we cannot simply abandon.

I actually feel a certain sympathy for Cathy in this respect. Not sympathy for the suffering she inflicts on other and certainly not an excuse for her actions. i mean sympathy for the fact that no one chooses the fundamental psychological constitution with which they begin life.

Had I been born with precisely the same psychological makeup Cathy, whould I have become the same person?

I cannot honestly say that I would not.

So when readers invoke timshel to insist that Cathy could simply have chosen another way, I want to ask them a question.

Are we defending the possibility of genuine moral choice or are we assuming that everyone possesses the capacities necessary to exercise it?

Welcome readers,

Over the last several weeks/months we've all seen an uptick in articles about schools/towns/states banning books from classrooms and libraries. Obviously, this is an important subject that many of us feel passionate about but unfortunately it has a tendency to come in waves and drown out any other discussion. We obviously don't want to ban this discussion but we also want to allow other posts some air to breathe. In order to accomplish this, we're going to post a discussion thread every month to allow users to post articles and discuss them. In addition, our friends at /r/bannedbooks would love for you to check out their sub and discuss banned books there as well.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Readers from Being a Burden to Authors, and for Making Them Beneficial to Publishers

It is a melancholy thing to walk through a used bookstore and see thousands of volumes changing hands with no means of remuneration for their authors. It is worse to see a library lend one book to hundreds of strangers, each of whom walks away knowing what was in it. And worst of all, friends of the machines now argue that any book, once purchased, may be closely examined, and used to produce new writing with neither payment nor permission.

I think it is agreed by all parties that we have sunk to this infelicitous state only because a series of short-sighted and mistaken court decisions has moved us farther and farther from the sacrosanct words of the Founding Fathers, as enshrined in our beloved Constitution.

But my intention is not to lament the errors of the past, but to relitigate them. Fortunately, our current Supreme Court has not hesitated to right what it sees as the wrongs of its predecessors.

I therefore humbly propose that we petition the Court to revisit the following cases, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection:

Preliminary: the Constitution. Let us begin with Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 Wikipedia, which empowers Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It says nothing of fair use, first sale, or the distinction between ideas and expression. These are Congressional and judicial inventions, and a strict constructionist Court will strike all of the cases and laws that created them.

1. Folsom v. Marsh (1841) Wikipedia. Justice Story held that some uses of a protected work, judged by their purpose, the amount taken, and their market effect, need no permission. This ultimately became the fair use doctrine (§107). Story was wrong, because deriving new value from a work is a taking: in plain language, theft of private property. Nothing in the Constitution supports this type of judicial activism, which confiscates the author's property and creates public rights at the author's expense.

2. Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus (1908) Wikipedia. A publisher forbade resale of a novel for less than one dollar, lest the market for full-priced books be damaged. It was denied; the Court held that copyright controls the first sale of a copy, not what the owner does with it afterward, even though the book obviously contains the publisher's protected work. This is the first-sale doctrine (§109). Overruling Bobbs-Merrill will return resale, lending, and libraries to the copyright holder's discretion, where they belong. Improvident booksellers will be forbidden to sell our intellectual property into virtual bondage.

But what if fair use and the first sale doctrine are allowed to stand? In that case we must claw back the author's rights one at a time. Many others besides these I omit, being studious of brevity.

3. Baker v. Selden (1880) Wikipedia. A copyright in a book explaining a bookkeeping system did not give its author rights in the system itself. This ruling establishes that copyright protects expression, not ideas, methods, or knowledge (§102(b)). But AI model training steals this unprotected material. Overruling Baker will restore to authors their rights in the knowledge their books convey. This knowledge is theirs to license if and only if they choose, and only to whom they choose.

4. Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone (1991) Wikipedia. The Court held that facts are not copyrightable and expressly rejected the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, under which effort alone earned protection. Rural had, by all accounts, worked very hard on its telephone directory; the Court did not consider this relevant. Authors work hard too, and they deserve to control subsequent use of their work. If a book has been written by humans, and for humans, only the IP owner can allow it to be read by non-humans. Overruling Feist will restore the authors' rightful claim to the fruits of their labor.

5. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (1994) Wikipedia. The Court made "transformative" use central to fair use and held that commercial purpose does not by itself defeat it. It also retreated from Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985) Wikipedia, which had called market effect "the single most important element" of fair use. Under Campbell, no factor is decisive: the four are "to be explored, and the results weighed together." By reversing Campbell and reinstating Harper & Row's ranking, we can return economic harm to its proper place as the decisive factor in fair use.

6. Sony v. Universal (1984) Wikipedia. Must we wait until the horse has bolted to bar the gate? It is equally absurd to imagine that we must show actual harm in order to collect damages, when we know it is possible the harm will occur. Yet for noncommercial uses, such as recording TV shows at home, Sony requires a copyright owner to prove a meaningful likelihood of future harm. This must be overturned, and the recorder must be required to prove that he or she never lent the tape to a neighbor who might otherwise have watched the broadcast, thus harming the IP owner.

7. American Geophysical Union v. Texaco (2d Cir. 1994) Wikipedia. Texaco counts only markets that are traditional, reasonable, or likely to be developed, and Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley (2d Cir. 2006) Wikipedia holds that an owner cannot claim a transformative market simply by offering to license it. Both must be overruled so that authors may be justly compensated for markets they might someday enter. How can we justify constraining an author's imagination? How does this help the author "promote the Progress of Science"?

8. Sega Enterprises v. Accolade (9th Cir. 1992) Wikipedia. The court held that copying an entire work is fair use when it is the only way to reach the unprotected ideas inside. AI developers rely on exactly this: copy the whole book, and keep only what the law leaves free. But once the body of the work has been so crudely violated -- often by literally destroying the original book -- it cannot be made whole again. This bell cannot be unrung.

9. Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) Wikipedia. Some will object that striking these doctrines raises First Amendment concerns, since Eldred described fair use and the idea/expression distinction as copyright's built-in free speech accommodations. The objection is absurd on its face. One cannot say that quoting a book copyrighted by another is free speech any more than one can say that expropriating Jeff Bezos's yacht for a bachelor party is freedom of assembly. It is a pity to lose Eldred, which otherwise upheld a twenty-year extension of copyright terms, but sacrifices must be made.

Conclusion. None of this requires new legislation, only a Court willing to read the Constitution as it was written, and right the wrongs of nearly two centuries. Authors will control their work, and the Progress of Science and useful Arts will proceed under the watchful eye of copyright holders, as the Founders intended.