From what I have been reading in the news recently, my reviews might soon be written by AI. Erewhon, by Samuel Butler published anonymously in 1872, contains one of the earliest explorations in literature of artificial intelligence. I thought it was time to take a look.

The opening chapters introduce us to Higgs, the book’s narrator, who works at a sheep station in an unnamed British colony. Butler based this section on his own experiences in New Zealand, where he fled to escape his overbearing, religious family. Just like Butler, Higgs goes on an expedition to explore uncharted areas.

After a perilous journey across a mountain range, Higgs finds himself in the country of Erewhon, which is an odd, distorted, mirror image of his own society. Erewhon criminalises physical illness while moral lapses receive compassion and medical assistance. There is an odd banking system where people deposit money in an effort to build up a kind of spiritual capital. A literal-minded religion teaches antipathy to machines. All of these topics cause Higgs to question conventional ways of thinking.

And this is where the famous section on machines and artificial intelligence comes in. Higgs finds The Book of the Machines, a set of documents describing a crisis thousands of years previously, when rapid technological evolution led to fears that machines would eventually enslave, or supersede, humanity. Reading The Book of the Machines, Higgs’ conventional assumptions come in for a pummelling. Machines are not considered as living, sentient things, but where does the dividing line exist? Is a leg a machine that life uses to get about? Or is a leg itself life? Plant life is not generally considered sentient, but it would be hard to say plants are not alive. Plants act to protect themselves and communicate with each other. Machines also protect themselves and communicate with each other. They need outside help to reproduce, but so do plants, which employ the services of bees. So are machines similar to plant life? And if we worry about becoming slaves to machines, what is the nature of the relationship that already exists? Even in the nineteenth century people were serving machines in a slavish capacity. A stoker on a ship spent backbreaking days feeding and tending a machine that relies on people for its continued existence. Equally, people rely on the labour of machines. The present population of the world could not be supported without them.

So coming back to where I started, does this book make me feel any better about the prospect of AI writing my reviews? Well, first I have to say that Erewhon is remarkable, coming out of strait-laced Victorian society, throwing over conventional thinking so completely that it remains challenging and thought provoking hundreds of years later. As for what the book has to say about artificial intelligence, you might end up agreeing with the Erewhonians who decide that it is safer to get rid of machines, given how they might develop. However, there is much to suggest this is not sensible The relationship between people and machines is as old as humanity itself. In fact, use of tools, which evolved into machines, might actually be the defining characteristic of humankind. People and machines are mutually dependent. Rather than seeing a threat to humanity from machines, you could say that, for better or worse, humans without machines are not really themselves.

My new book A Contradiction of Sandpipers is now available. I thought it was worth taking a few moments to think about my reasons for spending years writing it. You’d think as author of the thing it would be clear to me what I was trying to say, but writing is one thing – thinking about it afterwards is another.

So, the book is set in Victorian London, but is really about the sort of popular music that burst upon the world in the 1950s, and then went on a wonderful rampage through the 1960s and 1970s, and is still going strong into the twenty first century. That music has always been an important part of my life.

In the past, music with strong rhythm and beat was not the fun thing it is now. For centuries this sort of music was largely functional, whether it was coordinating the effort of oarsmen in galleys, seamen pulling ropes, soldiers on the march, or farm workers toting bales or picking crops.

The Industrial Revolution, in many ways, dragged people further into a working life of relentless rhythm, in factories and mills. Nineteenth century society more than any other, saw the dark side of mundane, repetitive labour. And yet the music that once accompanied backbreaking effort evolved from an aid to hard work, into something to be enjoyed for itself. The movement it tends to encourage, which we call dance, is not a march, or an accompaniment to rope hauling, but an expression of freedom.

I suppose that is what I was after. The book is an attempt to capture the feeling of coming home after a mundane day of putting yet another brick in the wall, and then listening to the sort of music which makes you feel like you could jump right over the wall.

That is the contradiction underlying A Contradiction of Sandpipers.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Contradiction-Sandpipers-Martin-Jones-ebook/dp/B0BZMKTGPD/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=A+Contradiction+of+Sandpipers+by+Martin+Jones&qid=1680849074&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Libra by Don DeLillo, published in 1988, is an imaginative reconstruction of events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963.

It might seem unlikely, but one of the first things that came to mind whilst reading Libra, was VAR, the Video Assistant Referee, which was supposed to take the controversy and doubt out of refereeing decisions in football. Did it? No. Instead the controversies just concentrated themselves on ever more subtle distinctions. And there isn’t really time for forensic analysis of video footage in the middle of a game of football, which after all is what people have paid to see. A recurring thread in Libra involves a CIA historian sitting in a room with vast amounts of mounting evidence. The assassination of President Kennedy is like a deadly serious and endlessly complex VAR controversy. Time moves on rather than freezing itself on one moment, leaving the historian gathering more and more information, not getting any nearer a conclusion, the conclusion becoming of academic interest only, as the events under study slip into the past.

Libra reads like an arty thriller, and it works well like that. But there is a lot to think about with this book. It is very relevant to contemporary concerns regarding conspiracy in its various forms – from the self-centred idea that certain people claim to see truth hidden to normal people, to that vague feeling of life itself seemingly pushing you in a certain direction through coincidence and unlikely twists of fate – which is where the somewhat ironic reference to astrology in the title comes in.

Anyway I will leave my evidence there. Gathering more won’t make the picture clearer. I have to make a call and not interrupt the run of play – so, yes, a compelling, interesting book, exploring typically modern dilemmas.

To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, is Virginia Woolf’s partly autobiographical novel about the Ramsay family, who stay with various guests at their holiday home on the Isle of Skye one summer in the early twentieth century.

In many ways this book is difficult to classify as a novel. There’s no story as such. The first section describes a day of hanging about the Ramsay’s residence. The holiday group combines highbrow, sometimes extremely annoying men, eight lively Ramsay children, the maternal Mrs Ramsey, a young girl about to marry, and a frustrated woman with artistic ambitions, who has been told by one of the male guests that women can’t paint, or write. A boat trip to a nearby lighthouse is tentatively planned but abandoned because the weather is unsuitable. The second section, following family loss, is a description of the deserted holiday home slowly falling apart. And in the third section, surviving members of the original party make a nostalgic return after ten years, Mr Ramsay and two of his now adolescent children, finally taking a boat trip to the lighthouse. That’s it.

Mrs Ramsay’s youngest boy, James, likes to cut pictures out of catalogues. To keep James occupied for as long as possible, his mother tries to find him pictures of items such as rakes, which require plenty of time-consuming trimming around prongs. The adult men, who are university professors and the like, are grown-up versions of young James, cutting things out from experience to study. In contrast there is an approach more associated with women in the book. For them, experience is best understood in terms of how things work together rather than in isolation. There’s one scene describing a trout in a river. Take the trout out of the river and it won’t be a trout for long. The trout’s essential troutness is best understood as part of the river.

There is some amazing descriptive writing. My favourite part of the book was the second section where the abandoned house is slowly deteriorating. It’s haunting, almost post-apocalyptic. So much goes on that doesn’t involve people at all, great tracts of time and events. People see only a tiny piece, and maybe, in the end, that tiny piece is best considered as part of something bigger.