It was a full house at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. Besides hearing great readings by the assembled authors, I also got to talk with some fans and friends of the winners.
Congratulations to the winners, and also congratulations to all the writers for having their words accepted for publication in two of the flagship venues in the field! And, thank you to Sheila Williams (editor of Asimov’s), Trevor Quachri (editor of Analog), and Emily Hockaday (managing editor of Asimov’s and Analog) for your work keeping the SF magazine dream alive (seconding Frank Wu’s remarks)!
I’ll let the magazines announce all of the winners, but I’ll post my photos of the speakers and authors who read below.
Opening Remarks by Sheila Williams and Trevor Quachri
Sam J. Miller Reading from “Planetstuck” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, March-April 2023)
Timons Esaias Reading “The Next Step” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January-February 2023) and Other Poems
Trevor Quachri Introducing the Analog Authors
Christina De La Rocha Reading “Life, But Not Quite as We Know It?” (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January-February 2023)
Victoria Navarra Reading from “Cornflower” (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January-February 2023)
Wukheiser (Frank Wu and Jay Werkheiser) Reading and Performing from “Poison” (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May/June 2023)
Latest Issues of Asimov’s and Analog Hot Off the Press
Recently, I ran across the image above of the program book and ticket of the stage adaptation of “The Wolves in the Walls,” based on the book of the same title by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean on my desk in Liverpool. It gave me pause.
It’s about a girl named Lucy, who likes to draw. She lives with her mum who makes jam, her dad who plays the tuba, and her brother who plays video games. One day, Lucy begins to hear wolves in the walls. At first, her family doesn’t believe her, but then the wolves come out and it’s all over! Pandemonium breaks loose and Lucy must brave the wolves to regain her pig puppet from the clutches of the crazy wolves.
The recent allegations against Gaiman made me think of the theatrical adaptation and source material in a completely skewed and disorienting way. Its difficult now to square my before and after interpretations.
It’s challenging to ignore what shouldn’t, according to Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1967), matter as far as how we interpret the text. We, the readers, shouldn’t give an author tyranny over our interpretation of a text. Yet, Gaiman is an author who has cultivated a public persona that dovetails with the positive interpretations of his creative work and associated social causes. Joss Whedon also comes to mind in terms of the close connection between auteur, themes, and social causes, and what happens when the auteur’s behavior conflicts with the constructed persona. Of course, these public personae are created, cultivated, supported, and accepted, but the person beneath the persona is far more complicated and potentially far different than the persona circulating in culture. The author’s behavior might be reprehensible and seem radically different from what the audience has come to expect from the author’s persona. A problem for the reader and critic is to disentangle the linkages between the work, persona, and person in order to provide richer interpretations as opposed to those dominated by the author, persona, or both. Of course, what Gaiman has been alleged to have done must be addressed and remedied in other ways.
MARKV.EXE (44,365 bytes) was developed in 1991 by Stefan Strack, who is now a Professor of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the University of Iowa. In the MARKV.DOC (10,166 bytes) file that accompanied the executable, Strack writes, “Mark V. Shaney featured in the “Computer Recreations” column by A.K.Dewdney in Scientific American. The original program (for a main-frame, I believe) was written by Bruce Ellis based on an idea by Don P. Mitchell. Dewdney tells the amusing story of a riot on net.singles when Mark V. Shaney’s ramblings were unleashed” (par. 2). Dewdney’s article on the MARKV.EXE program appears in the June 1989 issue of Scientific American. The article that Strack mentions is available in the Internet Archive here. A followup with reader responses, including a reader’s experiment with rewriting Dewdney’s June 1989 article with MARKV.EXE, is in the January 1990 issue here.
The program works by the user feeding a text into MARKV.EXE, which is “read.” This generates a hashed table of probabilistic weights for the words in the original text, which can be saved. The program then uses that table and an initial numerical seed value to generate text until it encounters the last word in the input text or the user presses Escape. The larger the text (given memory availability) , the more interesting its output text, because more data allows it to generate better probability weights for word associations (i.e., what word has a higher chance to follow a given word). Full details about how the program works can be found in the highly detailed and well-organized MARKV.DOC file included with the executable.
Using DOSBox on Debian 12 Bookworm, I experimented by having MARKV.EXE read William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” (1982). I pressed “R” for “Read,” entered the name of the text file (bchrome.txt), and pressed enter.
The program reported “reading” for a few minutes (running DOSBox at default settings).
After completing its “reading,” the program reported stats on the table that it created using bchrome.txt: 9167 terms (608,675 bytes).
I pressed “G” and the program began to generate text based on its table of probabilities generated from the bchrome.txt text file, which contained the short story, “Burning Chrome.” While the generated text flows across the screen, there are options to press “Esc” to stop or any other key to pause.
After it completed writing the generated text to the screen, I pressed “S” to save the generated text and it prompted me to type in a file name for the saved generated text: gibson.txt.
Pressing “S” gives the user an option to save the table for future use. I went with the default name, MARKKOV.MKV (not to be confused with a modern Matroska container file). This file can be loaded in MARKV.EXE on subsequent runs by pressing “L” and entering the name of the table. When the user presses “Q”, the program exits back to DOS and displays a message, “The random number seed was x,” where x is a random number used in the generation of text. If repeatability is important to the user, you’ll want to make a note of that number and use it with the -s modifier when running MARKV.EXE again (e.g., markv.exe -s2510).
Mark V. Shaney’s implementation of a Markov chain that builds a table of next word probability on a small text sample is one example of the predecessors to large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA and ChatGPT. However, Mark V. Shaney’s word association probabilities is far simpler than the much more complicated neural networks of LLMs (especially considering attention) with many orders of magnitude more parameters trained on gargantuan data sets. Nevertheless, Mark V. Shaney is one aspect of the bigger picture of artificial intelligence and machine learning development that led to where we are now.
The next academic year is just around the corner, so I wanted to give a shout out for the open educational resource (OER) that I published earlier this year, Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), an over 60,000 word textbook on the history of SF literature that includes a syllabus, video lectures, and more.
And, if you’re an educator needing open and free teaching materials and textbooks, here are some useful resources where you can find OERs:
