There is an article, about just this subject, on the Writers & Artists website by Claire ADMIN (sic) It is dated 4 December 2024, and, as it is well written, I’m presenting it.
Unfortunately, it isn’t clear who Claire ADMIN is. A search on the website reveals four authors named Claire, and the link to ‘Claire ADMIN’ doesn’t work.
“Writing terms can be difficult and confusing. We break down the difference between author voice, character voice and tone.
Voice is the author’s personal style. It’s all about how you – the author – describe things; your choice of words, punctuation styles, whether you use short sharp sentences, long running sentences, or a mixture of both.
Voice isn’t something that can be taught, but it is something that can be developed. An author’s voice is instinctual and unique, just like a finger print, however it can take years for an author to develop their own clear voice.
So what makes a strong author voice? If you hide the cover of a book, read the opening page, and know who the author is then they’ve done a great job of creating a strong voice. Here are a few examples from some of my favourite authors and how I recognise their writing.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave has a distinct poetic, melodic prose.
Katherine Rundell writes playfully and has some of the most visual metaphors out there. I bet good money that I could pick a Katherine Rundell metaphor out of a line-up!
Sally Rooney writes clean, simple language. Snappy sentences and short, sharp scenes of action are then followed by lengthier moments of character interiority
Think about the authors whose books you will automatically pre-order. What keeps pulling you to them? What is it about their writing that stands out?
Character voice
Yet, an author’s voice isn’t to be confused with character voice. This is all about how your characters come across on the page and how they express themselves, both externally and internally. Character voice can be dictated by many things including their backstory, background, quirks and foibles, motivations and inspirations, personality traits, which can include strengths and flaws, as well as their dialect and word choice.
A character’s voice will end with that book (unless it is a series) whereas the author’s voice will usually remain consistent throughout all of their books. Each character in your book should have a distinct voice and this is all to do with creating a band of characters who have different interests, quirks, strengths and weaknesses etc.
The strength of a character’s voice is intertwined with the strength of the initial character creation. Think about some of your most memorable characters in fiction and make a note of what it is about them that stands out.
For example, Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events is always rational and brave, even in dire circumstances. When she ties her hair with a ribbon, she is able to access her technical, logical mind and come up with an invention that will save her and her siblings from harm.
Tone
Tone is a writer’s attitude toward the subject and the mood implied by an author’s word choice. Tone can change throughout a story, based on the different situations, conflicts or settings that are introduced. A clear tone can help readers to understand the emotion of a particular scene or part in a story. There are many different types of tone, from happy to sad, sarcastic to serious, creepy to light-hearted, curious to conflicted etc. Sometimes, If you don’t convey the right tone for the right situation, readers will feel confused and unsure as to how they are meant to be feeling towards specific characters or moments in your plot.
Finding your author voice, character voice and the right tone are important to get right because without them, your story might lack depth and your readers could struggle to fully connect with your story.
When I saw the announcement for this newly published book, I recalled how my mother had taught me to deal with my feelings: “banish them, unless they’re good.” You won’t be surprised that I’ve spent many years dealing (often ineffectively) with negative feelings, and on reading the book I found that many others have had the same experience.
The book was written by Marc Brackett, who is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University. He is the author of the bestselling book Permission to Feel (translated into 27 languages) and which has transformed how individuals, schools and organisations approach emotional intelligence. He has headlined at more than 700 conferences, and advises Fortune 500 companies on integrating emotional intelligence into workplace culture.
Marc Brackett
Marc begins the book with a story about a short-tempered encounter that he had with his mother-in-law after a stressful day. His point is that even he is learning.
He then describes the seven reasons we can’t deal with our feelings:
We don’t value our emotions
We don’t recognise that dealing with feelings is a useful skill
Nobody taught us at home
Nobody taught us at school either
We love the quick fix
We rather treat ailments than prevent them
There is no institutional support for regulation (of our emotions)
He then introduces the concept of regulation of emotions, which is a series of steps we can take to get control of our emotions. Co-regulation is the steps we can take to influence the emotions of others. There are detailed examples of how these concepts work in practice.
He says that it is important to correctly label the emotions we are feeling; this introduces clarity to the process. Next, he introduces four strategies for emotional regulation: quieting the mind and body; thinking critically about what is or has happened; gaining emotional strength through relationships with others; and keeping ourselves healthy. There are further chapters on how children learn emotional regulation and becoming the best version of yourself. The book also includes a practical guide to building emotional regulation skills.
For all the numbered reasons mentioned above, mastering emotional regulation is not am easy subject to teach. One can come across as a superficial expert or a ‘wannabe’ expert. But Mr Brackett’s use of personal examples from his learning experience, his sympathy for people who get it wrong, and his use of familiar language, give the reader confidence in him as a teacher. He also connects emotional regulation to such familiar topics as mindfulness, empathy, yoga, cultivating friends, and personal health care in order to make ER seem less esoteric and more ordinary. His tone and his language are inclusive and friendly. This book will be a valuable guide and handbook for many of us.
Harry Bingham, the Founder and CEO of Jericho Writers, makes a good point about the inertia we sometimes feel as writers.
He says, “Just Jump!”
Harry says, “
Ray Bradbury, the author of Farenheit 451 and much else, was a fan of the future. A fan of boldness and technological adventure. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business because we’d be cynical: ‘It’s gonna go wrong.’ Or ‘She’s going to hurt me.’ Or ‘I had a couple of bad love affairs so therefore …’ Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.” That cliff-jumper is you. It’s me. It’s all of us. It’s certainly true for any first-time novelist. My first book was a giant 180,000 words long. (And yes, it went to print at that length. And no, it’s not a length that publishers are especially looking for. But if a book is good enough, the length is kinda immaterial.) I was naïve. I literally had no idea that writing a book and getting it published might be hard. I just assumed I could do it, and would do it. My track record (Oxford University, fancy American bank) was one of achievement. I knew I liked reading. I’d always assumed I’d end up being an author. So: write a book – how hard could it be? I knew how to write a sentence, so just do that over and over, and I’d have a book. Everyone receiving this email is less naïve. The tone of voice needed for a fast commercial adventure-caper was not the same tone as that had produced success in Oxford philosophy essays. Once I’d written 180,000 words, I looked back at the start and realised it was … ahem, in need of vigorous editing. The kind of editing that involved selecting 60,000 words and hitting Delete. So I deleted the rubbish and rewrote it. Wrote it better. But: That wasn’t a failure. It was the second most important step on the road to success. The most important was writing the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter. The most important step is always the same: it’s jumping off the cliff in the first place. Deleting 60,000 words was the next crucial step: acknowledging that what I’d done wasn’t good enough; that more work could fix it; that I needed to design and use some better wings. But you don’t get to the better-wing-design stage until you’ve got to the plummeting-downwards-out-of-control stage. You need them both. And honestly: the challenges probably get a little bit less as you write more books, get them published, get paid, learn the industry, build a readership. But each book is its own cliff – its own well of uncertainty. As you know, I’m a huge believer in nailing an elevator pitch before you start writing. I don’t care about pretty formulations – I don’t mind whether you have the kind of phrase that would look good on a book jacket or movie poster. But a list of ingredients that would spark interest in a potential book-buyer? That’s essential. But oh sweet lord, there is a huge gap between knowing that you have, in theory, a commercially viable novel and actually making it so. I have sometimes written books that flowed, start to finish, with no huge mid-point challenges, but those have been the exception. Mostly, there’s been a hole – a gap – a problem. I’m not a huge fan of pre-planning novels in vast detail. (But do what you like: it’s whatever works for you.) The only way to find that hole is to leap off the cliff. It’s the flying through the air that tells you what wings you need. So jump. Be uncertain. Jump anyway. Take the biggest boldest leap you can, knowing that you don’t have the answers. Just jump. Jump knowing that your wings aren’t ready. They get born by jumping. Wings that surprise you and delight you and complete you. So jump. Good luck. And happy Christmas.
In last Saturday’s Telegraph there was an article by Tom McArdle with the title “Waterstones chief: AI could produce the next War and Peace”.
James Daunt, CEO, Waterstones and Barnes & Nobel
THE chief executive of Waterstones has said he is open to the company selling books created by Artificial Intelligence, as long as they are clearly labelled.
James Daunt said it would be “up to the reader” whether to purchase them if they end up on his stores’ bookshelves.
There are major concerns from authors about the impact AI-generated content will have on the book industry, after a recent study found most writers feared their jobs were at risk from the technology.
But Mr Daunt, who has been the CEO of Waterstones since 2011, told BBC’s Big Boss podcast that AI could produce “the next War and Peace”.
“There’s a huge proliferation of AI-generated content and most of it is not books that we should be selling,” he said. “Hopefully, publishers avoid it; we as booksellers would certainly, naturally and instinctively, disdain it.”
A University of Cambridge study last month found widespread concerns from novelists about their jobs being replaced by the technology and fears that work written by humans could become “an expensive luxury”.
In response, Mr Daunt said: “At the more literary end I don’t see that being the case. There is a clear identification of readers with authors, and booksellers play an important role in joining authors and readers.
“That does require a real person.
“As a bookseller, we sell what publishers publish, but I can say that, instinctively, that is something we would recoil [from]. It’s really important that authors earn a living.”
Asked whether the high-street bookshop would sell AI books, he said: “We would never intentionally sell an AI-generated book that was disguising itself as being other than that.”
When pressed on whether he would consider it if they were clearly labelled, he responded: “Yeah, if it was clear what it was, then I think it’s up to the reader.
“Do I think that our booksellers are likely to put those kinds of books front and centre? I would be surprised.”
He warned that given the exorbitant sums of money being spent by tech companies on AI, it was hard to know its limits.
“Who’s to know,” he said. “They are spending trillions and trillions on AI and maybe it’s going to produce the next War and Peace. If people want to read that book – AI-generated or not – we will be selling it. As long as it doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t.”
Back is September, I reported on an interview with Dan Brown about his new novel, The Secret of Secrets, reported by Hillel Italie of the Associated Press.
For those of who are fans of Brown, I have to confess that Brown went to the same high school I did: Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, although Brown was class of ’82 and I was ’56.
Dan Brown
The reason I mention this is that Brown is interviewed by Matt Miller, in the Fall 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin, the alumni magazine. Matt W. Miller is an award-winning poet, essayist and educator. He taught English and coached football at the Academy for 18 years and is currently an associate lecturer in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
MM:The last installment of your Robert Langdon series came out eight years ago. What does it feel like to return to that character?
It’s like I never left. He and I share a lot of the same passions: history, art, codes, treasure hunts. I live vicariously through him. I sit alone in the dark with a computer, and he runs around the world. It’s a lot of fun.
MM: The book explores the noetic sciences, a multidisciplinary field that studies subjective experience and consciousness using scientific methods. What drew you to that subject?
I wrote a book called The Lost Symbol about 12 years ago in which there was a character, Katherine Solomon, and she was a noetic scientist. As I was writing that character and learning a little bit about noetics, I thought, oh my god, human consciousness is a book in itself. I thought it would be the book I wrote after The Lost Symbol, but it was too hard. I didn’t know enough about consciousness. I never imagined it would take eight years, but it’s an ethereal topic. I always felt like I was trying to get my arms around smoke, just trying to figure out how to write this.
MM: It’s a deeply researched book. Was there some “aha!” point when you knew this subject had to be the subject?
I read about an experiment in precognition where different parts of the brain light up when you see different kinds of images. In the study, the brain was lighting up before an image was seen. So, what does that mean? Perhaps the brain is creating what image to see. Or there was precognitive knowledge of what was about to be seen. Or perhaps time flows in two directions. Any of those answers, and you’re like, what? None of that makes sense. This experiment made me really think that, from a personal level, I had to understand consciousness. And as a writer, I had to figure out how to share it in a fun package.
MM: How do you balance getting all that researched information about politics, history, science, physics and metaphysics into the novel while also moving forward narrative action and character development?
You make sure that the data dump that you are performing is directly relevant to whatever character you’re writing about. Langdon could be walking down the street and think, oh, Petřín Tower, and I give a two-minute dissertation on Petřín Tower, which feels like an aside, and that’s boring. The information has to be part of solving a puzzle. It must be linear to the plot, not ancillary. And don’t fall in love with your research. If it doesn’t serve the plot, it goes.
MM: That’s the toughest thing for writers, knowing what to cut.
The delete key has to be your best friend. Any artist or musician understands the importance of blank space or silence. The rests and silences give the melody to that place. It’s the same way in writing. You need to let your writing breathe.
MM: You thank your editor Jason Kaufman in your acknowledgments. Does an editor, like a writing teacher, help you see where you need to pull back or where you need more?
That’s exactly what Jason does. He’ll read something and say: “Hey, this is great, but we don’t need four paragraphs about Prague Castle. We need two.” Then he’ll also say: “Oh, you just glossed over this thing. I want to know more about that.” He not only shares my taste, he has perspective, which is what you lose as a writer. It’s nice to have somebody come in and read it as a first-time reader, which is really the only way to know how it’s reading at all.
MM: The Secret of Secrets is set in Prague. What drew you to that city?
Setting is critical. Location is a character. Prague has a personality, as does Paris, as does the Arctic Circle. Wherever you’re setting a book, it needs to be integral to the plot. When I decided to write about consciousness, I knew it had to be Prague. Prague has been the mystical center of Europe since the 1500s, when Emperor Rudolf recruited mystics to come to Prague to talk to the Great Beyond. As far as character goes, Prague is perfect for a Langdon book. There are passageways and a door with seven locks and crypts and cathedrals and all sorts of secrets.
MM: As Langdon learns more about the nature of nonlocalized consciousness, I kept thinking about artificial intelligence. If AI could develop consciousness, where would that consciousness come from? Is it created? Is it tapped into?
Can we create artificial consciousness? When you have enough synapses, does it just happen? It seems unlikely that it just happens. And this whole new model of the brain as a receiver of consciousness changes everything because if we’re trying to build an AI to receive consciousness, it’s a much easier proposition. It’s not like you have to build something that can create all the hopes and dreams and creativity and memories and all that. You just have to receive it. I actually think that this model of consciousness is pretty exciting and makes the quest for artificial consciousness more attainable, as well as consciousness after bodily death.
MM: Not to give too much away, but there’s a fascinating section in the novel about halos and how they are rendered in art. Langdon saw the beams of light as emanating out of halos. But then he realizes he may have misread the images, that the beams are radiating back into the halos, and that is consciousness coming in.
Right. And if you read Scripture, really any religion, one receives the word of God. You don’t conjure God; God flows in. And we kind of miss that. That could be consciousness flowing in because it is not housed within the brain, as materialists presume, but outside the brain.
MM: You have a golem character. In the Jewish tradition, the Golem is a created being, an artificial intelligence with consciousness.
Yes, one of the reasons I chose the Golem is that it’s this inanimate object that can be infused with consciousness just by writing a magic symbol, or a code, on its forehead.
MM: Do you think that this novel and its topic of a nonlocalized consciousness may have a particular prescience in these times?
I hope so. There’s no bigger topic than human consciousness. It’s the lens through which we experience reality, experience ourselves and other people. The fear of death is the universal fear. Religious or atheist, we all are curious and unsettled by the fact that our lives are finite. This notion of what happens when we die is the big question. If we can adopt a mindset where we realize that human consciousness survives death, maybe some of that fear starts to dissolve. And the thing about the fear is that it’s really the catalyst for a lot of bad behavior.
MM: Do you believe in this idea you bring up in the novel that if consciousness transcends our physical self, then we can move beyond the borders of mortality and by doing so move beyond the borders between each other?
Yes, I do. If we can start to understand that this life is just one stop on a much bigger journey, bigger than things like nationalism, country, race and all those things that separate us, then it’s quite possible that humanity could move forward in a benevolent fashion.
There is an article in today’s Telegraph written by Tom Mc Ardle which reports on a study done by Dr Clementine Collett at Cambridge University on AI’s effects on literary trends.
Dr Clementine Collett is a DPhil student on the ‘Information, Communication and the Social Sciences’ course at the Oxford Internet Institute. Clementine’s doctoral research explores gender bias in artificial intelligence (AI) recruitment technology.
Clementine has worked as lead author on reports such as IA and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research (2019) with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and The Effects of AI on the Working Lives 0f Women (2022) with the IDB, OECD and UNESCO.
Dr Clementine Collett
Novels written without artificial intelligence will become an “expensive luxury”, according the report.
Dr Clementine Collett has claimed that the creative market could become “tiered”, with only those who could afford human-written work being able to read it.
“[There] is a real concern from literary creatives that we will have a two-tier market, more so than we have already,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“Where human-written work will be more expensive – a luxury item.Those who can afford it will read human-written novels and AI generated content will be cheap or free and that will potentially have big societal implications as well.”
Dr Collett, who conducted the study at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD), interviewed to nearly 400 literary creatives across the UK about the threat of generative AI.
“There is widespread concern from novelists that generative AI trained on vast amounts of fiction will undermine the value of writing and compete with human novelists,” she said.
Dr Collett called on the Government to weigh up the economic growth it has so far prioritised by developing AI, against the potential impact on the creative industries, including readers and the novel itself.
The study found that almost two thirds (59 per cent) of novelists reported that their work had already been used to train large language models, which power AI tools, without permission or payment.
Such practices have already impacted the livelihoods of those surveyed, with more than a third (39 per cent) reporting their income being negatively affected by AI.
The report found genre fiction, especially romance, thrillers and crime, is more at risk from displacement than more highbrow literary fiction. Dr Collett said this was because of their more “formulaic” make up.
“We don’t know what generative AI is going to be able to do in the future in terms of producing more original content,” she added.
“It’s really important because novels are such a bedrock of our thriving British creative industry and they’re the core part of our humanity.” She called on Government intervention to help protect the industry.
Prof Gina Neff, executive director of the MCTD, said: “Our creative industries are not expendable collateral damage in the race to develop AI. They are national treasures worth defending.”
A spokesman for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “We’ve always been clear on the need to work with both the creative industries and the AI sector to drive AI innovation and ensure robust protections for creators.”
I persuaded myself to buy this book after reading that, “The Confessions of Saint Augustine is one of the most influential autobiographies ever written. In this timeless work, Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, candidly reflects on his moral struggles, spiritual journey, and ultimate conversion to Christianity. With honesty and depth, his shares his transformation from a life of sin to one of faith and grace.”
The Conversion of Saint Augustine
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras, Algeria) in the Roman privince of Numidia. His mother, Monnica, was a devout Christian; his father Patricius was a pagan who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. Scholars generally agree that Augustine and his family were Berbers, an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, but were heavily Romanized, speaking only Latin at home as a matter of pride and dignity.
At the age of 11, Augustine was sent to school at Madaurus a small Numidian city about 31 kilometres south of Thagaste. There he became familiar with Latin literature, as well as pagan beliefs and practices. His first insight into the nature of sin occurred when he and a number of friends stole pears from a neighbourhood garden.
At the age of 17, through the generosity of his fellow citizen Romanianus, Augustine went to Carthage to continue his education in rhetoric, though it was above the financial means of his family. Despite the good warnings of his mother, as a youth Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a time, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits. Augustine began a relationship with a young woman in Carthage. Though his mother wanted him to marry a person of his class, the woman remained his lover. He was warned by his mother to avoid fornication (sex outside marriage), but Augustine persisted in the relationship for over fifteen years. He ended his relationship with his lover in order to prepare to marry a teenage heiress. By the time he was able to marry her, however, he had already converted to Christianity and decided to become a Christian priest and the marriage did not happen.
After converting to Christianity, Augustine turned against his profession as a rhetoric professor in order to devote more time to preaching. In 391 Augustine was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius (now Annaba), in Algeria. He was especially interested in discovering how his previous rhetorical training in Italian schools would help the Christian Church achieve its objective of discovering and teaching the different scriptures in the Bible. He became a famous preacher, and was noted for combating the Manichaean religion, to which he had formerly adhered. He preached around 6,000 to 10,000 sermons when he was alive; however, there are only around 500 sermons that are accessible today. In 395, he was made Bishop of Hippo. He remained in that position until his death in 430. Bishops were the only individuals allowed to preach when he was alive and he scheduled time to preach after being ordained despite a busy schedule made up of preparing sermons and preaching at other churches besides his own.
As a theologian and philosopher, his writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine and Confessions.
When I started reading Confessions, I was expecting a clear and complete confession of his sins, together with a detailed account of what persuaded him to convert to Christianity. The detail is missing. He confesses, however, to the theft of the pears and to relationships with concubines. He mentions the influence of his mother, but there is little about his conversion. Much of the book is devoted to his praise of God. From the very beginning if the book, he is clearly a man of very deep faith, though he regarded himself as sinner, and the transition from sinner to saint is granted. He also engages in philosophical discussions. The book was translated into ‘thou and thee English’. I found the book long (345 pages) and disappointing.
The subtitle of this book is ‘& Behind the Scenes of Shadow Cell’. The author is ‘Harry Greene’.
After reading an article in the Atlantic about two CIA agents who fell in love on an assignment involving the creation of a shadow cell inside a global competitor of USA, I searched on Amazon for their book.
There appeared to be several, but I couldn’t find one with Shadow Cell in the main title. So I picked this one out as a likely candidate.
This book at 135 pages. The interesting information in it could have been divulged in ten pages. It is repetitious on several subjects: tight security at CIA; the two agents felt under great pressure at CIA for their relationship; the agents were clever, top performers. There were almost no examples backing up these assertions. The author is very careful to speak kindly of the CIA and the agents, and not to mention even a trivial fact which might be classified. He probably wants to be clear of any litigation, should his real name be known.
How wrong my choice was! This one is most likely a knock off of the real book (pictured below). A knock-off written by a Joe Bloggs under the pen name of a Harry Green. There is a Harry Green listed on Amazon who has written 16 fiction and non-fiction books on various subjects, none of which include the CIA. This book has an ISBN number (which no longer comes up on Amazon searches). In fact, this book no longer exists according to Amazon. This book doesn’t mention its publisher or its printer. It says only that the book was printed in New Haven, Connecticut on 10 September 2025. There is no author biography or statement of his/her relationship to the agents or the CIA. The narrator starts right in as if he had permission to tell the story.
The real book: a New York Times Bestseller!
Interestingly, I don’t believe the real book was listed on amazon.co.uk when I bought the knock-off. In fact, it still doesn’t seem to be listed. I just bought a real copy on amazon.com. It was published on 9 September 2025.
So what’s all the hubbub about? Well, here’s the publicity from the real thing:
“INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A thrilling firsthand account by husband-and-wife CIA operatives who, against all odds, triumphed in a deadly cat-and-mouse game against a mole within the agency—an unprecedented insider account of 21st-century spycraft in the tradition of Argo and Black Ops.
Andrew and Jihi Bustamante were a “tandem couple”: married spies who’d dedicated their lives to the CIA. They met as trainees at Langley, and got married while hunting terrorists across the globe. Then, suddenly, they were assigned to a mission so sensitive and explosive that the CIA still has never acknowledged it. The CIA’s source network in a country code-named “Falcon”—one of America’s most formidable rivals—had been compromised by a mole, and the agency needed a new way to collect intelligence there. Young newlyweds, the Bustamantes were considered safe choices for this daunting task precisely because they had no experience in Falcon. They were also loyal, forgettable, and completely disposable—operatives who could help to strengthen the CIA’s position in Falcon while simultaneously serving as bait for the mole.
But although their superiors at the CIA didn’t realize it, the Bustamantes also brought another advantage to the table: a granular understanding of how terrorist cells operate, and how the agency could exploit those same tactics to keep America safe. Assembling a rag-tag team of fellow operatives and recruiting new sources from Falcon, the Bustamantes pioneered a new way of spying by building a cell of their own—right at the heart of the CIA.
The propulsive, untold tale of one of history’s greatest intelligence crises and the unlikely band of agents who were sent in to clean up the mess, Shadow Cell allows us to peer behind the curtain to see how today’s spy wars are being fought—and won.”
There is an article in the Atlantic magazine on 19 September about how the publishing industry views AI. It is written by Boris Kachka, Senior Editor of the Atlantic. He titles the article ‘Publishing’s New Microgenre’
Boris Kachka
“Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts. Many in the culture industries see AI as not just a thief but an existential competitor, ready to replace human writers at every turn. Yet publishers are also fascinated by the technology (and not only because they use it for marketing and other tasks). The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride, fictionalize, and occasionally incorporate AI.
Among these recent releases, one overarching theme is a debate occurring between so-called accelerationists and doomers—those who think superintelligence will hugely benefit humanity and those who suspect it will kill us all. Adam Becker, a journalist and former astrophysicist, disagrees with both groups. Becker, the author of the recent anti-utopian critique More Everything Forever, wrote about his problems with a new dystopian manifesto, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
Becker’s main objection to both sides is that they overhype the long-term, world-altering effects of superintelligence while downplaying the “much more immediate and well-founded concerns about the dangers of thoughtlessly deployed technology,” he writes. The kinds of ongoing changes that he would prefer to focus on are well accounted for in 2025’s AI book haul. Readers can find out more about how AI’s processes resemble the workings of our brains (or don’t); how the technology is changing medicine, warfare, education, business, and politics; how it has already profoundly altered society. But to me, the most interesting of the crop (or maybe just the most fun) are the works that explore our individual relationships with AI, through fiction or memoir.
Novels such as Amy Shearn’s Animal Instinct and Jayson Greene’s UnWorld imagine chatbots standing in for boyfriends or dead loved ones; politician-author Stacey Abrams invents a rogue medical-AI company in her latest legal thriller, Coded Justice. Hamid Ismailov’s wildly experimental novel We Computers, translated from Uzbek and longlisted for a 2025 National Book Award, creates an alternate history in which a 1980s computer intelligently generates a new kind of mind-expanding, transnational literature.
Occupying a category all its own is Searches, a fragmented memoir in which Vauhini Vara works through her complex feelings about technology. Vara interweaves the story of the rise of the internet with the narrative of her life and work as a tech reporter. She also includes strange interludes: prose-poetic lists of her Google searches; a collection of her Amazon-purchase reviews; and, most strikingly, a series of long interactions with ChatGPT-3 as she works to revise an essay about a sister who died years ago. As Matteo Wong noted in his Atlantic article about the book, the large language model produced what Vara considered to be the essay’s best lines while also inserting plenty of lies. She wound up employing the bot not to think for her, but to prod her into a different kind of thinking; it forced her, she writes, “to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.” I enjoyed the book in part because it was less about what technology is doing to us than what we are doing in response.”
On the AP website there is an interview of Dan Brown written by Hillel Italie, which explores his writing techniques in the context of his new novel, Secret of Secrets.
Dan Brown
Brown says, “Anybody who writes a thriller needs to have a plan. There’s a great saying that the thriller writer who starts a book without knowing where’s he’s going is just lying,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
“And certainly these books are very complicated. One way I sort of battle, trying to keep it all straight, is to write every single day, just to keep it fresh. If I go through two sleep cycles (without writing), it starts to evaporate. And, of course, I also have what looks like a detective’s chalkboard in a police station. We’ve got the pictures and the yarn and the notes and the sticky notes, all that on my wall trying to keep it straight as well.”
Brown’s “The Secret of Secrets” has been published this week, a 650-page thriller and mind-bender from the author known worldwide for “The Da Vinci Code”, “Angels & Demons” and other million sellers. Brown again combines suspense, philosophical digressions and travelogues, along with codes and puzzles and secret societies as he dispatches favorite protagonist Robert Langdon to Prague and ensnares him in a deadly, international race for the key to ultimate wisdom — what happens when we die.
Besides Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who has found adventure and trouble everywhere from Paris to Washington, D.C., Brown has brought back love interest/noetic scientist-in-distress Katherine Solomon and a New York-based book editor with a very real-life counterpart. “Jonas Faukman” is an anagram for Brown’s editor at Doubleday Books, Jason Kaufman, who has worked with the author for more than 20 years. Author and editor are good friends, they say, although that didn’t keep Brown from subjecting Faukman to abduction and other un-literary experiences in his latest book.
“I always enjoy getting manuscripts from Dan and seeing where he’s going,” Kaufman told the AP recently. “I have to ask him not to tell me in advance what he has in mind. He always finds new ways to surprise me.”
Brown also spoke with the AP about how he decides on his subjects, his evolving thoughts on mortality and why Prague is the perfect setting for a few conspiracies. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: How do you go about deciding what to write about?
BROWN: It’s no secret that I like to write about big topics and there really is no topic that is bigger than consciousness. It is the lens through which we see ourselves. And so the real challenge was how to make a concrete urgent modern thriller about something that’s so ethereal.
About eight years ago, my mom passed away about the time that I was thinking of writing about consciousness, and I started asking myself, “What happens when we die?” and if you’d asked me eight years, ago, I’d say nothing It’s full stop total blackness. Over the course of the eight years that took me to write this book and all the conversations that I had with philosophers and physicists and noetic scientists, I’ve come out the other side with a totally different mindset. And in fact, it sounds crazy. I no longer fear death.
AP: Before you worked on this book, did you consider yourself an atheist? An agnostic? How would you have described yourself?
BROWN: I grew up Christian, Episcopalian, but I moved away from the organized nature of religion. I’ve always been spiritual and sensed there’s something else, but I’ve also been skeptical and said, “Well, that sense of there’s just something else could just be wishful thinking.” It could be because it’s so hard to imagine that there’s nothing else that we just sort of say, “Well, I sense there’s some thing else.”
And now I do sense there’s something else. And that is from an intellectual standpoint. I have not had a religious experience, a spiritual experience, an outer body experience, or near death experience. This change of mind comes from looking at the science that is happening right now in the world of physics and noetics.
AP: Some people talk about the creative process, so to speak, as almost a religious experience, that moment the idea comes to you, whether it’s the right phrase or a piece of music.
BROWN: It’s called flow, a muse. Certainly, we writers have that experience of, “Ah, I’ve got it. It’s just flowing through me.” I have certainly felt that. Not every day, unfortunately. There’s a lot of trial and error, but that is the feeling that creative people are always looking for. My mom was a professional musician. I was brought up to be a musician. I thought I would be a musician. I still play piano every day. I studied music composition in university, and I’ve had that experience also with music.
That sort of muse moment when something flows in, it’s different between writing and music. Writing sort of feels like finding the right Lego piece to put in. You say, “Ah.” It’s almost like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You’re like, “Got it. It fits.” And music is a little bit more fluid. It’s like making a big brush stroke. And the melody just sort of flows in and finds its way to your hands, and then it exists.
AP: The cities you set your books in are so important to what you do. Do you have a kind of wish list? Like, “I need to set a book in this city.”
BROWN: I mean, there are a few of them that I won’t mention because I don’t want people running out, and they’re sort of off the beaten path, kind of like Prague is.
I like to use location as a character. I want to make sure that, whatever book it is, it could only be set there. “The Lost Symbol” could only be set in D.C. because it’s about the symbology of D.C. “The Da Vinci Code” could only be set in Paris because it is about the Roseland. “The Secret of Secrets,” about human consciousness, could only be set in Prague. It’s been the mystical capital of Europe since Emperor Rudolf II (in the late 16th-early 17th centuries) brought all the mystics and scribes and alchemists to Prague. And as a character, Prague is perfect for Langdon. It’s full of secret passageways and cathedrals and monasteries and all, that’s his world.
AP: Puzzles and mystery and passageways, that’s just endlessly fascinating to you? It’s as interesting to you now as when you were 10 or 20?
BROWN: I don’t know what that says about me, but yeah, I still love secret passageways. You talk about that “aha” moment. It’s kind of the same thing to say, “Wait, there’s something here that you don’t see and now you see it.” It’s the same kind of sensation of “aha.”
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