Excerpt
This is the seventh Best of British Science Fiction, and for the previous six I have included in my introduction a bit of a snapshot of what I'm up to, and a little of my impressions of what is going on in the world of short science-fiction stories: the sorts of things people are writing about. The zeitgeist if you will.
This year it was good to see a wide variety of publications to choose from, including many I'd not received stories from previously. The short fiction market appears to be a healthy one.
Each year I do this, I try to see if I can detect any common themes among my submissions. There still seem to be a few pandemic-inspired stories in the mix, but they have tailed off considerably. Sifting through the rest of the stories it became clear that there were two simmering societal concerns feeding into the creative psyche: colonisation and the disruption of AI.
AI in particular has been of growing concern to creatives of all kinds, and it concerns me too. AI content scrapers that produce convincing images in any bespoke style following just a few prompts, or Language Learning Models that can churn out any type of prose or poetry in seconds have grown from the laughable crudeness seen by early adopters to more and more sophisticated and convincing outputs as the months have passed. 2022 saw an outcry as first a theatre company advertising a ballet, then a major publisher revealing a cover for a popular author were discovered to have used AI art instead of employing a human artist.
Remember the government poster from a few years ago of a ballerina tying up her shoes saying, "Fatima's next job could be in cyber"? Well, Fatima had probably best stick to dancing, as it turns out the LLMs are getting better and better at coding too.
It would be a very strong-willed person indeed who hasn't experimented a little with these 'toys.' I myself was curious enough to try Craiyon – just for making some throwaway visual jokes to share in an online chat, and I had a go at prompting ChatGPT, just to see what it could do. The results weren't terribly good, but they were delivered speedily, and that was the scary thing to me. Writing copy was not bringing in the big bucks for friends, but they have already seen their work opportunities diminish as a result of AI. There is a certain tone to AI writing that can't really be flattened out using the provided filters and parameters, but it seems the corporations who just want some copy aren't that discerning.
It's enough to make you wonder what will happen with story writing. Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke announced in February that the magazine would be closed to submissions temporarily due to being flooded with an unmanageable quantity of AI-generated stories. Other editors have shared similar tales of an uptick in spammy submissions. And yes, AI stories are nothing but spam. If you can't write the story yourself, why bother? I would urge any writers who are tired of rejection to just keep writing and improving, and one day it will happen. Not every story is good. Not every good story is published. Not every good, published story gets picked up for anthologies like this one. Take it from me, rejection is character building… and world building… and prose tightening. You will get there. Please don't use AI.
When it comes to writing ourselves out of the singularity, I noticed several stories in the submissions pile had the robots falling in love with us. Perhaps one day, we will be living together in a sort of electric dream, but for now at least I'm confident that ChatGPT and its like could not write with the skill and nuance of the writers we have, and we can cut a clear channel between true art and the cheaters' prose.
Many stories were about making deep explorations in space, terraforming and colonisation. In many ways this theme is harking back to the 'Golden Age' as it is often termed. Now, though, following many billionaire-funded rocket launches over the past couple of years, it's not difficult to see what could be possible, eventually. And there are tinges of future-past anxiety in some of the stories that engage the reader on a deeper philosophical level. We could, but should we? Why would we even go? Perhaps, here too, is a buried dread of venturing further out than our home in a much more down to earth sense: the end of the Global Pandemic; general feelings of reluctance at the idea of leaving the place where we feel safest.
All of these stories are ones that really made me feel something – that's the kind of story I like, be it hard or soft SF, space opera, technological, parallel dimensions, alternative history, quirky, satirical, militaristic, or funny.