There’s a lot of intellectual meat in this story that’s interesting. But, my first comment was: “I’m finding myself surprisingly impressed about some aesthetic/stylistic choices here, which I’m surprised I haven’t seen before in AI Takeoff Fiction.”
In normal english phrasing across multiple paragraphs, there’s a sort of rise-and-fall of tension. You establish a minor conflict, confusion, or an open loop of curiosity, and then something happens that resolves it a bit. This isn’t just about the content of ‘what happens’, but also what sort of phrasing one uses. In verbal audio storytelling, this often is accompanied with the pitch of your voice rising and falling.
And this story… even moreso than Accelerando or other similar works, somehow gave me this consistent metaphorical vibe of “rising pitch”. Like, some club music where it keeps sounding like the bass is about to drop, but instead it just keeps rising and rising. Something about most of the paragraph structures feel like they’re supposed to be the first half of a two-paragraph-long-clause, and then instead… another first half of a clause happens, and another.
And this was incredibly appropriate for what the story was trying to do. I dunno how intentional any of that was but I quite appreciated it, and am kinda in awe and boggled and what precisely created the effect – I don’t think I’d be able to do it on purpose myself without a lot of study and thought.
There’s a lot of intellectual meat in this story that’s interesting. But, my first comment was: “I’m finding myself surprisingly impressed about some aesthetic/stylistic choices here, which I’m surprised I haven’t seen before in AI Takeoff Fiction.”
In normal english phrasing across multiple paragraphs, there’s a sort of rise-and-fall of tension. You establish a minor conflict, confusion, or an open loop of curiosity, and then something happens that resolves it a bit. This isn’t just about the content of ‘what happens’, but also what sort of phrasing one uses. In verbal audio storytelling, this often is accompanied with the pitch of your voice rising and falling.
And this story… even moreso than Accelerando or other similar works, somehow gave me this consistent metaphorical vibe of “rising pitch”. Like, some club music where it keeps sounding like the bass is about to drop, but instead it just keeps rising and rising. Something about most of the paragraph structures feel like they’re supposed to be the first half of a two-paragraph-long-clause, and then instead… another first half of a clause happens, and another.
And this was incredibly appropriate for what the story was trying to do. I dunno how intentional any of that was but I quite appreciated it, and am kinda in awe and boggled and what precisely created the effect – I don’t think I’d be able to do it on purpose myself without a lot of study and thought.