Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Remember "War Games"? Y ou’ve probably heard about the New York Times reporter who was creeped out by his conversation with Microsoft’s new chatbot.  The reporter kept pressing questions to which there was no factual answer, and the chatbot eventually started returning responses that, if uttered by a person, would seem kind of ominous. That includes professing love for the guy and apparently trying to get him to leave his wife. It also expressed a vague yearning to do bad things. It’s alive! We knew this would happen! All those movies and books about sentient computers were right!  Or not. It’s also possible that Bing was simply mashing up all those movies and books about sentient computers. Chatbots are based on large language models that span the breadth of the internet. To paraphrase John Lennon, there’s nothing they can know that isn’t known. More accurately, there’s nothing they can write that hasn’t already been written. Because it’s the internet, that will include quit...

W hat do you hate most in a book? The Washington Post this week ran a piece on that very subject. It was a timely read for me. I had just finished one novel by a favorite female author and am several pages into another novel by another favorite female author. The first I disliked; the second I’m savoring. First, the books: “The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy,” by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell’s nom de plume ), and “Sea of Tranquility,” by Emily St. John Mandel (author of the excellent “Station Eleven”). In his Post essay, book critic Ron Charles posted reader responses to his request for pet peeves in writing. I was gratified to learn that the worst annoyances coincide closely with my own. The mother of all sins, of course, being dream sequences. Hey, I thought that was just me! But Ron’s readers seem united in their disdain for this creaky and frustrating plot device. The Vine book has at least a couple, and I realized it’s hard for me to concentrate when I’m rolling my eyes. None so far in the E...

A warm apocalypse welcome from Ron Swanson I ’m all caught up on “The Last of Us,” television’s latest foray into the zombie-apocalypse genre. Of course I am! With the wife out of town for a few days, it’s time for this grown-ass man to watch whatever the hell he wants.  That means zombies. Longtime readers (there might be one or two) will know that I run hot and cold on this genre. I briefly swore it off after the third season of “The Walking Dead.” But then came the buzz about this new HBO Max show, based on the hit Playstation video game. I was drawn back like a dog to a dead possum.  My impressions, based on the first three episodes: It’s not bad. It doesn’t add much to the whole flesh-eating horde canon, but it has a fine cast, capable writing and superb production values. By “production values,” I mean haunting CGI of American infrastructure laid low by 20 years of deferred maintenance. In a world of ravenous fungoids, regular weed-eating is the first thing to go. We all...

China's beautiful balloon W e were tracking that Chinese spy balloon here at the Warehouse. But now it’s been shot down off the Carolinas. Biden says U.S. fighters took care of it, but did they? We don’t trust the government. We trust MAGA and Marge Greene.   Yes, the balloon was at an altitude somewhat beyond the range of weapons used primarily for school massacres. But when you believe in Qanon and Jewish space lasers and rampant election fraud, as Marge does, it’s not that hard to believe that your gun can shoot 12 miles. Especially if you climb a really tall tree to do it. It’s just common sense! Last time Americans got this excited about a balloon was in 2009, when noted publicity whore Richard Heene told authorities his 6-year-old son was trapped in a primitive craft drifting across Colorado. Turned out that the kid, Falcon (of course), was in the attic instead. The Heenes were fined $36,000 and got some jail time out of it. They were pardoned in 2020, for reasons that ...

Those bikes need a lot of adjustment T here’s something about being an older white guy in America: At some point you feel like the kids need to get off your lawn. Figuratively speaking.  We got some new neighbors a few weeks ago. This neighborhood is OK, but there’s a somewhat decrepit rental house across the street. It’s so decrepit that it is actually affordable. Thus, the tenants come and go. They come for the affordable rent; they go because the house is, well, decrepit. Black mold and so forth.  Our newest neighbors are two or three young guys who spend a lot of time working on their mini motorbikes on the sidewalk out front. There’s only one way to work on a motorbike. You tinker with it, and then you start it up and twist the throttle to see if your tinkering has made any difference. Maybe take a test run up and down the street. Repeat until the neighbors call the authorities.  We’re not calling the authorities. Sometimes, brooding through slatted blinds, I’ve felt...