Derek B. Miller's Blog

[I'm on Substack: https://drderekbmiller.substack.com]

I love scandalous women. To be properly scandalous these women need to understand the mores, cultures, expectations, and social codes of their day and then — willfully — break them in some glorious and public and memorable manner. Achieving this requires intellect and force of character, not to mention a certain amount of bravery and courage and imagination for what is possible, if not permissible. Add in some wonderful clothing, a promise of sex and violence, and dialogue that practically writes itself and we’re off to the races.

There will never be enough scandalous women and I’m always on the lookout for more.

One of my favorites is Wallada bint-al-Mustakfi; a Muslim Andalusian poet and troublemaker in 11th century Cordoba. This might seem an obscure reference and I would have thought so too if I haven’t been walking down a street in Cordoba, Spain, in March of 2023 (so … not so long ago) and came across this sandwich board in the middle of the street (the photo is mine):

[visit my Substack for the picture]

As far as I’m concerned, this is the benchmark: To be so cultured, famous and scandalous that Spain is still talking about it a thousand years later.

Ladies: Good luck beating that.

Which, of course, is a natural segue to Artificial Intelligence (if you’re a novelist).

For reasons I have now explained, the “scandalous woman” is a nexus for drama. Ideas, action, excitement, culture, danger, justice, rebellion, sex, salaciousness — it is all there for the telling if you know how to look. As a novelist with seven books under my belt, I do. And it is obvious to be that Wallada and I need to spend some serious time together. If you’re a novelist and you’re reading this … back off. She’s mine.

As all academics know, the first step in starting a new project where you aspire to making a unique contribution to “the literature” is by reading it. After all, your question may already have been asked and answered and as anyone knows who has tried, making a unique contribution to the world of ideas is very, very hard.

Luckily, in literature, the standards are different. Plots are repeated and stories often retold in new ways for new audiences. So for a fiction writer, the goal is more like market research rather than an academic literature review: Perhaps someone did cover the topic before, but if it was done long ago and poorly, it’s probably ripe for the plucking.

Both Europe and the Muslim world have had a thousand years to mull over Wallada. It didn’t seem likely that I was the first one.

So: To ChatGPT I went.

Why? Partly because I’m committed to this investigation into AI and Literature and wanted to see what it would say and do. But also because wanted to know the answer to this question: “Please list for me any novels about Wallada.”

This was the response.

There are a few novels that feature Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, the famous Andalusian poet. Here are some notable examples:

"Poet and Muse: The Loves of Wallada and Ibn Zaydun" by María Rosa Menocal

This historical novel delves into the passionate and tumultuous love affair between Wallada and the poet Ibn Zaydun, set against the backdrop of 11th-century Córdoba.

"Las tres culturas: Andalus" by Enrique Gómez Carrillo
This novel explores the cultural and social dynamics of Andalusian Spain, with Wallada as a prominent figure representing the intellectual and artistic milieu of the time.

"El collar de la paloma" by Miguel Ángel de Rus
While not exclusively about Wallada, this novel portrays her as an influential character, weaving her story into the broader narrative of medieval Spain and its rich cultural tapestry.

These novels capture different aspects of Wallada's life, her poetry, and her significant role in Andalusian society.

“Excellent,” I wrote (always eager and encouraging.) “Tell me when they were published and what kinds of reception they received.”

Here are the publication details and reception information for the novels mentioned:

"Poet and Muse: The Loves of Wallada and Ibn Zaydun" by María Rosa Menocal

Publication Date: Unfortunately, this title appears to be a misattribution. María Rosa Menocal, a prominent scholar, and author of works like "The Ornament of the World," did not write a novel specifically titled "Poet and Muse: The Loves of Wallada and Ibn Zaydun." Her works do discuss the cultural and historical context of figures like Wallada and Ibn Zaydun, but not in the form of a novel.
Reception: N/A

"Las tres culturas: Andalus" by Enrique Gómez Carrillo
Publication Date: 1919
Reception: Enrique Gómez Carrillo was a renowned Guatemalan writer, journalist, and diplomat. His works were well-received for their rich descriptions and historical depth. "Las tres culturas: Andalus" is appreciated for its vivid portrayal of the cultural intersections in medieval Spain, including Wallada's era. The reception of this book highlighted Carrillo's ability to bring historical periods to life and his meticulous research.

"El collar de la paloma" by Miguel Ángel de Rus
Publication Date: 2011
Reception: This novel received positive reviews for its imaginative reconstruction of medieval Andalusian life and its engaging narrative. Critics and readers praised de Rus for his ability to interweave historical facts with fiction, making the story of Wallada and her contemporaries accessible and captivating. The book is noted for its lyrical prose and depth of historical insight.

These novels, where Wallada appears, offer different interpretations and creative imaginings of her life and times, contributing to her enduring legacy in literature.

Great stuff. Both English-language and Spanish and a few initial references spanning a hundred years, but no mega-starts likely to stop my rise to the NYT Bestseller list.

But there’s the thing: None of those books exist.

Searches in both Google and on Amazon reveal no such books. And when I looked up the authors and scanned their bibliographies, there were no books either.

After a few more rounds of my pulling GPT’s proverbial leg, finally got this admission:

I apologize for the errors in my previous responses. It seems I have provided incorrect information about novels related to Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. Let me correct this and provide accurate details.

As of my last update, there are few, if any, novels specifically centered on Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. Her life and poetry have been the subject of scholarly research and historical works, but she has not been widely featured in novels.

To provide accurate information, I'll need to verify if there have been recent publications or overlooked works. If you are looking for accurate details on Wallada's life and legacy, scholarly books, articles, and historical texts may be more reliable sources.

Would you like me to find some of these academic or historical resources, or assist with another request?

No thank you.

According to IBM, “AI hallucination is a phenomenon wherein a large language model (LLM)—often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool—perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.” https://www.ibm.com/topics/ai-halluci...

It is worth quoting the next few sentences too because as just-another-observer of AI “behavior”, I’m not convinced this explains what I just described with Wallada:

“Generally, if a user makes a request of a generative AI tool, they desire an output that appropriately addresses the prompt (i.e., a correct answer to a question). However, sometimes AI algorithms produce outputs that are not based on training data, are incorrectly decoded by the transformer or do not follow any identifiable pattern. In other words, it “hallucinates” the response.

The term may seem paradoxical, given that hallucinations are typically associated with human or animal brains, not machines. But from a metaphorical standpoint, hallucination accurately describes these outputs, especially in the case of image and pattern recognition (where outputs can be truly surreal in appearance).”

The operative terms here are “pattern recognition,” and while I’m not a computer scientist or AI expert, I am a social scientist (Ph.D. with an expertise in interpretive methods), and I get “pattern recognition.”

Generally speaking, there are many tried-and-true ways to screw up pattern recognition. There’s confirmation bias and false causality, confirmation by anecdote, circular reasoning, overgeneralization or excessive claims based on limited evidence, using “mirror imagining” where we impose a familiar to preferred interpretive framework on an observed pattern and in doing so fail to understand a system on its own terms and the list goes on.

But as a new user of AI I can’t help but notice that GPT didn’t do any of that when producing the list of fake books. It didn’t fail to understand a pattern at all. Rather, it made stuff up. Very detailed stuff.

So when IBM writes, “AI hallucinations are similar to how humans sometimes see figures in the clouds or faces on the moon,” I get the concept, but in order to see a figure in the clouds that isn’t there, there need to be clouds. If you see figures in clouds that aren’t there, you don’t have a pattern recognition problem: you’re nuts.

Now: This is where it all get a little trippy, so hang in there, because I’m about to ask GPT — the thing that’s nuts — why it’s nuts. The only reason this can work is because ChatGPT is not a person. That is, it isn’t actually nuts. It’s just a software good at some things and bad at others.

I quoted IBM’s definition to it and then wrote, “But what do we call what just happened with your Wallada references? You didn't have a pattern recognition problem; you made stuff up. What do we call that and how do we explain it?”

Here’s what it provided, which is actually helpful because the people who built it actually do understand why it happens:

What you experienced with the fabricated Wallada references is indeed a form of AI hallucination, but it can be more specifically described as a "hallucination in natural language processing (NLP)". Here's a breakdown of what happened and how it can be explained:

AI Hallucination in NLP

In the context of large language models like the one you're interacting with, hallucination refers to the generation of text that is not grounded in the model's training data. This can include:

Fabricated Information: Creating non-existent facts, such as books or references that do not exist.
Incorrect Details: Mixing up details from different sources or generating plausible but incorrect information.
Why It Happens

Pattern Generation: The model is designed to predict and generate text based on patterns it learned during training. When asked about specific books, it generated titles and details that seemed plausible but were not real because it aimed to match the pattern of a legitimate answer.
Lack of Specific Data: If the model doesn't have specific information about a query, it may try to fill the gap by creating content that fits the general context, which can lead to inaccuracies.
Overfitting to Context: The model tries to provide coherent and contextually appropriate responses. In doing so, it sometimes generates information that fits the context of the query but isn't accurate or real.
Addressing Hallucination

To minimize and address AI hallucinations, several approaches are used:

Fact-Checking and Verification: Integrating external verification mechanisms to check the accuracy of the generated information against reliable sources.
Prompt Engineering: Crafting prompts that reduce ambiguity and guide the model towards providing verifiable information.
Human-in-the-Loop: Involving human oversight to review and correct the generated content.
Conclusion

The term "hallucination" is used metaphorically to describe these phenomena in AI. While it's not a perfect analogy, it captures the essence of the issue: the generation of outputs that don't correspond to reality. In your case, the model generated plausible but incorrect references about Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, demonstrating a common challenge in NLP systems. This highlights the importance of verifying AI-generated information, especially when accuracy is crucial.

Let’s linger on my favorite part: “When asked about specific books, it generated titles and details that seemed plausible but were not real because it aimed to match the pattern of a legitimate answer.”

I know politicians who do nothing but this.

Here’s where I am as a writer facing these facts about non-facts:

Do not trust AI: It will keep talking even when it knows nothing because it has been programmed to blather than admit to ignorance. Again, I know people like this and so do you. The design intent of GPT and other AI programs is produce text that is coherent and contextually relevant to the user's query which it will prioritize over admitting uncertainty, especially if the model's training data doesn't include explicit instructions to recognize when it should say "I don't know."
Do not use AI for fact checking: If “I don’t know” is not considered a legitimate answer, you will never hear it. Anything that does not admit to not knowing cannot be trusted with facts.
Do not ask it to write anything where facts are required: There is a lot of discussion about AI “doing the writing” but aside from form letters (which is actually does very well!), don’t ask it to produce text on which other people might need to make decisions. Maybe someday, but certainly not now and even in fiction, let alone non-fiction (because it will always produce fictions when in doubt).
When all is said and done, however, I’m more convinced that ever that Wallada would be an excellent subject for a novel or Netflix series …

— DBM, 1 July, 2024

I deleted my account. I decided it was pointless; it put me in a bad mood all the time; I couldn't start a day without watching a snuff film; and nothing was being accomplished. It was also a massive waste of my time.

I'll be writing more here, and perhaps more substantially. I am also writing essays on the specific matter of AI and Literature at a Substack that I hope you will subscribe to. It is free but if you can manage the paid subscription, it would be appreciated. I am, after all, only a novelist.

https://drderekbmiller.substack.com/?...

That topic may not seem relevant to you but as someone here at Goodreads, I assure you it is. AI is already influencing how manuscripts are created, reviewed, selected for acquisition, prepared, marketed and sold. As a reader, you are already inside the AI domain, and if you want to hear the story from a senior novelist (and social scientist), that's the place.

See you all soon.

Derek

My fourth novel, RADIO LIFE, is a post-apocalyptic epic about a civilization on the rise, more than 400 years after the end of the world. It might be my greatest narrative achievement and I love this book, which was massively overlooked (but singled out by the Financial Times and The Guardian among others, for critical acclaim).

It is newly recorded for Audible by Gabra Zackman, which narrated THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI.

I'm giving away a free Promo Code for the audio book to anyone who can convince me why I should.

Derek

https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Radio-...

__________

In this riveting political thriller, The Commonwealth, a post-apocalyptic civilization on the rise, is locked in a clash of ideas with the Keepers, a fight which threatens to destroy the world ... again.

When Lilly was first Chief Engineer at The Commonwealth, nearly fifty years ago, the Central Archive wasn't yet the greatest repository of knowledge in the known world, protected by scribes copying every piece of found material—books, maps, even scraps of paper—and disseminating them by Archive Runners to hidden off-site locations for safe keeping. Back then, there was no Order of Silence to create and maintain secret routes deep into the sand-covered towers of the Gone World or into the northern forests beyond Sea Glass Lake. Back then, the world was still quiet, because Lilly hadn't yet found the Harrington Box.

But times change. Recently, the Keepers have started gathering to the east of Yellow Ridge—thousands upon thousands of them—and every one of them determined to burn the Central Archives to the ground, no matter the cost, possessed by an irrational fear that bringing back the ancient knowledge will destroy the world all over again. To prevent that, they will do anything.

Fourteen days ago the Keepers chased 16-year-old Archive Runner Elimisha into a forbidden Gone World Tower and brought the entire thing down on her. Instead of being killed, though, she slipped into an ancient unmapped bomb shelter where she has discovered a cache of food and fresh water, a two-way radio like the one Lilly's been working on for years ... and something else. Something that calls itself 'the internet' ...

I have written a novel called LITTLE SATAN: A DANGEROUS NOVEL. It is unpublished because, so far, I have been unable to find a publisher. Why? Hard to say because I think it is a superb and award-winning piece of work and among my best. Time will tell what happens to it because it has been rejected by the American literary community (but not the American audience that does not know it exists).

Agents often ask writers to produce a letter to editors who will consider a new manuscript. I wrote one for LITTLE SATAN, which is both the title of the novel and the term that the Iranian government uses for Israel.

I thought it would be interesting to share it with you here. It is common for books to be rejected. But I'm … established. That is less common. What does it therefore mean and tell us?

It is a worthy question to ask:
______________
LITTLE SATAN: A DANGEROUS NOVEL
By Derek B. Miller

I'm old enough to remember Rodney King's lament, "can't we all just get along?" I'm old enough to remember the caustic response to it and the social pressure to embrace a new orthodoxy that ridiculed him for being too naive and aloof to the revolutionary fury his beating unleashed. And yet, I also remember that I didn't submit to that pressure because — simple though his question was — it seemed to be one that united us all.


His question reminded me of Oscar Wilde's lesson that all bad poetry is sincere. So too, I think, are honest questions. I can see now that King's question wasn't meant to be answered. It was meant to be asked.


A question that needs to be asked is a powerful thing. My own upbringing taught me that questions unite us and answers divide us. I was also taught — and I still believe — that a good question can therefore change the world.


And so: I watched Hamas attack Israel and record their rapes with GoPros. I watched Israel level the place in rage. As I watched all of the unfolding horror, King’s question was not mine because I felt like I could see the unfortunate answer. But I was haunted by a kindred thought: It didn't have to be like this.


I didn’t mean October 7th of 2023. I didn’t mean the first months of 2024. I meant the entire damn thing.

The Middle East as we know it.



So … what if?

What if … what? I asked myself.

What if … there was a Palestinian state?

What if … it existed side by side with a flourishing Israel and the two exchanged students and ideas and art and … fluids?


What if it had been like that since 1948 and all was well? Or so both this hypothetical Israel and Palestine thought?



Two new questions came to mind: What might have happened to turn it all around back then? And — even more exciting — what would that world have looked like after it did?


I wanted to know. I wanted to see this remade world. I wanted to go there. Not to hide, but to find something that we have all lost. Some possibility that only an act of imagination can provide.


The fundamentals to an alternative history were clear: The Arabs would have had to have accepted the UNSCOP Partition Plan of 1947 and also the UN Resolution 181 that adopted it. Instead of a war in ’48, two states (Israel and the Arab Republic of Palestine) would have both declared their independence and Jerusalem would have become the corpus separatum — the separate body that was not a city nor a state but something unique and separate and other and only on the planet earth: which it is.


So: Peace in the Middle East?

Not quite: Because more remained and lingered and encroached on that fragile peace.


The "more" included the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, imperatives of the Cold War, decolonization, the birth of new states, and the development of new ideas in response to them. There were Marxists and Baathists and Pan-Arabists and Jihadists who wanted the Caliphate back. 

There was the Islamic Republic of Iran.


What would all that have meant for both Israel and this new Palestine and their prospects for peace?

And what was the story? I was getting closer to it.

I knew that turning the history around in 1948 would not be easy.

This was not Robert Harris's Fatherland where almost anything could have changed the course of WWII thereby allowing the Nazis to win. The Battle of Britain could have been lost. The Battle of the Atlantic. As I wrote about in my last novel, The Curse of Pietro Houdini, the Battle of Montecassino could have failed to break through the southern lines. The Germans could have developed the nuclear bomb. In this sense, Harris had it easy. 


For this story, the Arabs had to accept Israel. Not so obvious. I couldn't pick something from a list; I had to engineer it. Something outrageous and imaginative; dramatic and bold; plausible but startling. 


Still no story, admittedly, but an energy. A pulse. I felt life coming to this new place that was a function of its birth. 


What would it look like?


I wanted to know. I wanted to make it a reality. I wanted to rebuild the Middle East and then play that model forward for decades so I could dwell inside it and meet the people who lived there and share an adventure. And a part of me was convinced millions of readers might want to visit that world too.


I started reading with the intention of a dramatist but the background of a scholar. I have a doctorate in international relations, and I worked for over a decade at the UN in Geneva on peace and security issues. I have a professional’s knowledge and experience with the Middle East and my previous novel on the region —The Girl in Green — was critically acclaimed, in part, because of it. I knew such a story would be explosive in today's environment but I had the street cred to write it and at that point … I didn't care. I wasn't about to let one mob or another keep this from happening.


As I read I looked for details. Details in the UNSCOP findings and recommendations; details in Sayyid Qutb's Islamist philosophies that built the Muslim Brotherhood and inspired Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution. I looked for details in Islamic thinkers of the Golden Age like Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and then later, Ibn Khaldun. I looked for Soviet propaganda and active measures against the Jewish state. I looked for the fault lines; the cracks; the disruptions that would rip the Middle East apart and threaten the fragile peace that my Israelis and my Palestinians had created. 


A story formed out of the drama. I moved beyond facts and counter-factuals and found ideas and people and motivations and possibilities and excitement and dangers and a problematic for my protagonists to solve. As the story formed I turned away from the real war that I couldn't affect, the death I couldn't stop, justice I couldn't offer, and the pain I couldn't relieve, and I did what artists and intellectuals do when all else fails: I wrote.


I wrote a four hundred page alternative history spy thriller unlike any other in eight weeks in the middle of a war that is, as I write this, still not over.



Little Satan: A Dangerous Novel, is a bold and unapologetic new universe. It is a sui generis espionage novel set in 1979 during the Iranian revolution. It is a story of friendship against the odds and of the darkness of totalitarian theology encroaching on life, light and love. It is a chase-across-the-desert, no-holds barred adventure, while also being a lament and a cowboy song of sadness. It introduces a new kind of spy — the Venice Operative — and a new kind of spying. Like science fiction it is speculative. But unlike science fiction, it imagines a world we feel might be there, just beyond the looking glass, a world that might allow us to ask the new questions we need to ask if we are going to bring about better outcomes for everyone.



If Rodney King's question attracted some eye rolling, so too did the final stanza of John Greenleaf Whittier's Maud Muller (1856), which all of us know: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen," he wrote, "The saddest are these: 'It might have been!"


Wouldn't it be a wonder, though, to see what might have been?

-- Derek B. Miller

Trump's victory has left pundits and political scientists searching for answers. Such people come in different varieties. Some see the forest for the trees, others the trees for the forest, and an overwhelming number spend their time staring at the leaves (whatever the question). There is another place to stand, though, and something else to see: If we pull the camera way, way back we might take in the entire planet for a second. It may seem counterintuitive to get farther away to see better, great Pointellist artists like Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro knew the secret: Sometimes the forms only come into view when you are far enough away.

I worked at the UN for over a decade and my expertise — my commitment — was developing new methods for the generation of local knowledge and then applying that knowledge the design and planning of local action for peace and security. That meant, in effect, trying to understand how people live and think and get things done in a plurality of different cultures to reach, in the words of Clifford Geertz, "an understanding of understandings not our own." The idea was that if we could learn what made sense to people locally, we could better design strategies for engaging them in ways that would work better. In our case: post-conflict stabilization.

Here's what I saw in Haiti, and Yemen, and Ghana, and Nepal, and Somalia, and Sierra Leone, and a dozen other places I worked in or cooperated with or studied that helps me see this election and those all across the world: As globalization continues apace, there is a decidedly clear turn to the local when faced with a dissatisfaction with the universal. We called it Localization.

Today we see countries like Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Italy and Israel all turning further to the right. We saw BREXIT. We saw and continue to see the rise of Trump but also Trumpism; a provincial, pragmatic, anti-nuanced "America first" ideology that sees American greatness lying in its past and not its future and one that prefers to craft fictions rather than face realities.

Outside the West the Localization trend is visible in India, the Philippines, and to some extent Russia (though their pale green dot sauntered off the democratic radar long ago).

And what about where democracy has no dominion or aspiration? We no longer see a striving for it as we did after World War two and the drafting of the UN Charter. Instead we acknowledge the rise of Jihadism, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a sharp turn toward increased Islamic observance rather than the softening of rules and enforcement.

What they all have in common is a turn to the local: a revitalized energy by communities to defend their own cultural systems and values and identities, all of which cohere into ways of life that matter to them. While these ways of life take a plurality of forms, the meaning is the same: We do not want to disappear. We want our ways of life to survive. And in some cases, we want them to expand and dominate.

Archimedes said he could move the world if only he had a place to stand. As the inventor of the fulcrum, he meant it rather literally. In our case, we do have a place to stand if we can take the leap: Into the minds eye where proper analysis makes world-changing observations possible, and offers a chance for action to follow suit.

Until we come to terms with the fear and desperation of people not to disappear into a homogenizing world we will not understand why the ground continues to shake beneath our feet and why all the institutions we have built to hold us together now threaten to tear us apart. Localization is the counter-force of the future. The pattern, as they say, is robust.



[Dr. Derek B. Miller is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Pell Center at Salve Regina, a former UN staff member, and novelist. His latest book is The Curse of Pietro Houdini.]

There are no laws to writing historical fiction. Freedom of speech and expression have no bounds.

There are no rules. There is no body that oversees the writer's engagement with the genre.

And there are no customs that direct us to writing with a seriousness of mind guided by expectations or social norms.

No: there is only the writer and the covenant formed with the reader.

In my case, I am committed to historical accuracy. On reflection it is for two reasons. The fact that the two reasons work in synergy is why my commitment is firm.

The first is an ethical stance anchored in observation: People learn most of their history through drama; and that matters because in a democracy regular people make big decisions.

The Boston Public Library is the oldest in America. Engraved in stone on the frieze are these words: The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.

Yes. It does. And I want to be a part of that.

But literature is not merely a vehicle for education. It entertains. It expands. It engulfs. Done right, we fall into John Gardner's "fictional dream" and live other lives. So why — for art's sake — should we take historical accuracy seriously?

That brings me to the second reason found best in the words of Bruce Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light": "Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun, Oh, but mama that's where the fun is."

History is our burning sun. It is everything that came before and it is, indeed, blinding. And yet … what else?

My inspiration — my north star for finding the fun inside the courage to face the truth— are the first sentences of Edith Wharton's 1937 translation of The Trojan Women. There, she defined for me the gold standard for what historical fiction can and should do. She wrote:

The greatest piece of anti-war literature there is in the world was written 2,350 years ago. This is a statement worth a thought or two. Nothing since, no description or denunciation of war's terrors and futilities, ranks with The Trojan Women, which was put upon the Athenian stage by Euripides in the year 416 b. c. In that faraway age a man saw with perfect clarity what war was, and wrote what he saw in a play of surpassing power…

I was moved to tears by The Trojan Women. I quoted from it to start The Curse of Pietro Houdini — my latest novel — which is historical fiction, adventure fiction, and a survivor story. Euripides, I saw, did not root his plot in authenticity, but rather derived and discovered the plot from it. He did not weave together the threads of the past to create a new story, but rather internalized the essence of the events so profoundly that the characters, their dialogue, their decisions, their emotions, and their fates became a product of that intense act of empathy and listening.

Historical fiction is the movement of the past through the soul of the writer. What results is what the mind can learn, the soul can understand, and the writer's own creativity and craft can convey. As always, the better we understand the world, the better we can dwell within it.

Derek B. Miller
Olivella, Spain
August, 2024

My debut novel, NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT, was rejected by so many publishers I stopped thinking about it. I know some writers keep track of these sorts of things, and some have even papered their walls with them, but I've never been one for histrionics or vanity projects. I haven't even framed my degrees. I figure … they're in my head. And if they don't express themselves in my words and deeds then they're rather pointless.

There must have been at least twenty, though.

My game plan at the time was this: I get published. I get descent sales and good reviews. I get a second book published on those grounds. I don't choke on the BIG SECOND NOVEL and instead show my range. Then, established, I open the aperture wider and start to have some fun. I publish what feels right; I bring in solid advances (read, $80-120,000), and after about three or four novels my back catalogue will start to kick in with the royalties to pad out the missing income from the advances. If I work hard and smart and get a killer novel out every eighteen months, I should be solid after five novels and living well so long as the well doesn't run dry.

I literally would bank on my imagination and hard work.

And, of course, at some point, Hollywood would come knocking and a movie or TV series would bring in the big money and give me some financial depth to ride out the bad times or else enjoy myself if they never came (knock on wood).

So how did that go?

[insert chuckle].

Not so well.

My first novel sold respectively and gained excellent reviews. I did not choke on THE GIRL IN GREEN and instead wrote a book I still love and that was critically acclaimed without exception.

My third novel, AMERICAN BY DAY, was the most fun I had writing in ages and Irv was a hoot. It landed me an advance "in the zone" and I was able to stay off the ropes.

And then … COVID.

I wrote three novels: RADIO LIFE, QUIET TIME, and HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK. It was a train wreck.

RADIO LIFE is an epic science fiction novel that I'm convinced would be a brilliant series. But it was only published in the UK and never even sold in the U.S. And this was despite glowing reviews in the Financial Times and the Sunday Times among others. It was complete overlooked and broke my heart.

QUIET TIME was the only semi-autobiographical story I ever wrote (and I suspect, ever will) and it was intimate and funny and sad and timely and my agent told me not to publish it as a book because it would compete with RADIO LIFE as they'd come out at the same time and I had no time to wait because RADIO LIFE didn't pay me much. So it became an AUDIBLE ORIGINAL and never saw the light of day as a novel. That broke my heart.

And then came HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK, a novel selected as a Best Mystery of 2021 by the New York Times, and became a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (previously won by Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Safran Foer and other obscure authors like them). I was given my lowest advance yet because of lackluster prior sales, my former editor left, and because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was so terrible at selling books they were bought out by Simon & Schuster and my novel got lost in the shuffle because — among other matters — it was handled by a junior editor who lacked the skills to see it through the acquisition.

Later, I had a fight with my literary agency (I have since been profoundly vindicated, and no, I won't go into details) and went to seek other representation.

Writers House took me on (bless them), and helped THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI into the world. But it was a challenging launch and still hasn't found its proper audience.

Now — on book eight — I have sent out LITTLE SATAN: A DANGEROUS NOVEL to wide, MY, consideration because my previous publisher didn't know what to do with it so we opted to withdraw it from consideration and put it out to market.

That means, I'm eight novels in (no movie, because those who wanted to make NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT really blew it) and I'm risking it all by sending the new manuscript out to everyone.

The state of affairs, ladies and gents, is that it's project to project, moment to moment, and it's a crazy way to live a life. My ex-wife couldn't take it. Or me. One of those two, but they're so intertwined they not be separate factors.

All of which is to say, it does not get easier. And yet … onward. Because what else?

https://drderekbmiller.substack.com
_____________

This is goodreads, which means people are here for books.

Or are they?

Some people love the carnal joy of books as artifacts. The first editions, the signed copies, the covers, the smell, the way a full shelf is a promise sure to deliver.

I share that joy.

However: Books are but a technology: a way to convey a story from one mind to another across a distance of space or time or both. The oral tradition required us to be together. People could see who was doing the telling. Now, the author is away. Soon — we now have to wonder — whether there is even an author at all.

Welcome to the new world of AI where computers will craft stories and — at least for a time — either assist or compete with people.

This is why I started "AI and Literature": A blog or newsletter or substack (or whatever we're calling these things) were I discuss the evolution of this new nexus between writers and AI.

I am not uniquely qualified to discuss this, but I am unusual. I'm a social scientist (Ph.D. in international relations and social theory) and I'm an established novelist (seven critically acclaimed novels and more to come). So I'm a practitioner with some capacity to reflect. My hope is that the space becomes an opportunity to explore the topic with other writers, researchers, scholars, engineers and more so that we evolve into a rich archive on the early days of this new — if worrying — encounter.

Join me. Spread the word. Because life is what we attend to. And if we give our attention to books, we really ought to care what's behind them.

https://drderekbmiller.substack.com

— DBM, 25 June, 2024

Radio Life and A Canticle for Leibowitz
Derek B. Miller, 13 August, 2020

I was a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 meeting a friend for lunch. We were at the Pub. It must have been October or so because I remember the stone cottage in Westchester County, New York, being surrounded by the changing leaves. The sense of the school year was starting and the excitement was uplifting. Autumn was never melancholy or wistfulness on campus. It provided a kind of spiritual settling. Here comes the winter with the promise of books, ideas, and just maybe the cuddling of a new lover.
I can't remember the friend but I remember the conversation. We were talking about books — as people do at Sarah Lawrence — and in this case science fiction. "Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?" he asked me.
No. Never heard of it.
‘It's a classic,’ he said.
Sounded Jewish. And Catholic. And mystical, as though it was inspired by something real and was only masquerading as fiction.
All good stuff.
‘You've got to read it,’ he said.
OK.
He described it and I still remember the description: there was a Flame Deluge (a nuclear war) and the population was wiped out. The survivors blamed the scientists and burned all the books. But there was a tiny abbey of monks run by an order of people who protected every scrap of paper and knowledge they could find even though they had no idea what any of it meant. They came across a box that contained the seeds of new technology.
I can't remember the rest, but I was intrigued.

I didn't read it.
(I was a Freshman. There were changing leaves, and classes, and girls, and other books, and girls, and classes, and leaves).

Twenty years went by and I'd long-since forgotten all about it. Then I saw a movie called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington (and Jennifer Beals, who was excellent and unappreciated in that role). I didn't love the movie but I was reminded of the premise of Canticle — as it was told to me — by the scene at the end where the survivors try and build a new library and Eli (i.e. Washington) recites the Bible so they can add it to the collection. This was a linear ‘homage’ to that 1959 story whether the screenwriter knew it or not.

I still didn't read it.
But I did start thinking about it partly because I had a premise for a new science fiction story that I was kicking around. I was noticing that all around me were dystopian stories (Planet of the Apes, Dredd, Looper, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Oblivion …) but nothing about the renaissance of civilization after the end. Nothing about the rise.

Now it's 2012 and I'm watching a documentary with Keanu Reeves called Side by Side. It's about film-making and captures a moment when the industry is switching over from film to digital. The conversations ranged from artistic possibilities to what's gained and lost to what it means for the democratization of storytelling and whether we might lose something vital. It was all fascinating. But one issue jumped out: At the end of the documentary, a cinematographer named Geoff Boyle reflected (along with George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and others) on the lax state of our archiving and whether these films/movies would even still exist a few hundred years from now — let alone after an apocalyptic event.
Geoff's view? (I'm quoting from the film here), ‘We're f**cked.’

I was intrigued. It wasn’t about the rise of civilization but it suggested a kind of blank canvas from which a new civilization might rise. All movies, gone? Because the technology failed? If the failure was the internet and cloud storage, wouldn’t that also eradicate pictures and books and music and everything else that was being moved to the cloud?
If we projected into the future a few decades or a hundred years … what wouldn’t be in the cloud?
Eager (read: too eager), I wrote a whopping six pages of a screenplay based on this notion in 2012.
Then I abandoned it and moved on. I had books to write.

In 2015 I turned back to it. By that time I'd already written a feature-length screenplay to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, and was enjoying the new form of writing (not that it could replace novels, but it was fun). I had seen Mad Max: Fury Road (a masterpiece of visualizing the same-old same-old dystopian vision) and also read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (which I quite liked), but even that thoughtful story too ended long before my idea for a story would begin. The only story I’d ever heard of that addressed the rise was that Canticle book I never read.
By the time of the 2016 election I was becoming convinced that there was a space in our conversation about the future for a new kind of post-apocalyptic story. One that wasn’t dystopian, per se, but about creation and the challenges we’d face if we all had to try again.
That year I wrote twenty-one new pages of a new screenplay. Something about a meteor landing in Antarctica. It wasn't good, and it didn't resemble Radio Life in any way except in three regards: I had the title and loved it. Henry and Graham were already named. And their repartee and relationship as a couple jumped off the page.
Still: it was terrible. I went back to novels.

After finishing my third novel, America by Day in 2017, I needed to do something else and I wanted to have another go at Radio Life, this time as a feature-length screenplay. I got in touch with Geoff Boyle from the Side by Side movie to get the homework started and to develop new ideas. Geoff’s very tapped into the technical community and so he started asking around on my behalf. He talked to the media storage companies that all the movie studios use to archive their material. Though it wasn't a scientific poll, he wrote me and said (I'm quoting our correspondence), ‘at least 80% use Amazon Web Services. None of them know where their material is stored. They'd never thought about it. One, who was willing to talk if they were not named, was really concerned by the question once they thought about it. They are one of the largest companies specialising in data-handling from camera to archive. It appears that nobody knows where or how their material is stored, even the companies that said they had their own storage would mostly admit that that was just front end immediate rushes and that everything else was “in the cloud”. There really isn't anything else to say, publicly it's all fine, privately they are scared.’
That was when the idea of Radio Life really came together. It was not only possible for the world to forget everything; it seems like we actually will if we put everything in ‘the cloud’ and the cloud fails. The first part is happening now. Libraries are closing. Books are being digitised. All of our photographs and music are online now. It’s only a matter of time before we have nothing on paper.
Could the cloud fail?
Does any technology not fail?

At this point I also knew that I had to read A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was now a full thirty years since I first heard of the book and its premise. It was hovering over me. There was no writing Radio Life without engaging with this book written by Miller; a man who only published one novel in his tragic life and then one posthumously.
In 1959 there was no internet. There was no ‘cloud.’ There was no digitisation of knowledge and there was no way for it all to vanish at once. To achieve that condition in his imagined world, Miller (I later learned) created a period called the Age of Simplification where survivors set out to destroy all the knowledge, having blamed it for the destruction of the world. Mechanics aside, there was no denying that I was utilising a premise that he established some sixty years earlier. To my mind, it would have been both dishonourable and counter-productive to proceed as if I didn’t know it; the former for obvious reasons, but the latter because Radio Life’s potential value to our cultural conversation would be — if there would be any at all — in revitalising a conversation about remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, knowledge and wisdom, competition and cooperation all within the domain of science fiction.
After all, two things were colliding all around us by 2017: the rise of world-changing technology on the one hand, and the decline of trust in reason, logic, facts, truth, and scientific method on the other. A strange combination, it would seem, but a real one. In an age of strong(er) AI, nanotechnology, CRISPR and gene manipulation, killer robots, and STEM cell research we were also experiencing a full-on assault on our core democratic processes and institutions, multilateralism, international cooperation, and the post-WWII liberal order. We were once again moving in the direction of all-engine, no steering wheel. That was Miller’s world in the 1950s.
I was now certain that Ignorance needed to be the new Bad Boy of science fiction. After all, haven't we had our fill of asteroids, comets, aliens, waves, tornados, earthquakes, supervillains and monsters?

Now I had to read Canticle.
I still didn’t read it.

But this time was different. I wasn’t distracted or hesitant or busy. I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew that I needed to attend to the core themes and problematics of the story on my own without being swayed by Miller’s own answers.
I’m a mature writer and I’m not anxious about being influenced, as Harold Bloom might have suspected. I’ve written a doctorate, four books, and much more. So I don’t have a young writer’s fear about being lead on matters of style or tone or voice. But ideas – solutions to problems and mysteries – are more furtive. More insidious, in a way. It is easy to accidentally adopt philosophies and concepts them as one’s own and then move forward without a second thought to attribution. Art, after all, thrives not only on inspiration but theft. The weak-minded and the weak-willed are too fast to mistake an analytical product, or a hard-won insight, or a conceptualisation of a problematic, as their own. Watching the world rise again in the distant future, where knowledge and the act of remembering were central tensions in a drama where other people wanted us to forget, were ideas explored by Walter Miller Jr. in A Canticle for Leibowitz. They were also ideas largely untouched since then, and the book itself all but forgotten (which I’ll come to in a moment).

I didn’t need the will to read Canticle now. I needed a strategy.

My solution was to write about three quarters of Radio Life. Alessandra, by that time (in the screenplay), had escaped and Elimisha had not. The ending, more or less, was clear to me. I knew what I believed and the ideas were on paper. Canticle wasn't going to direct me now. It could only give me a basis for reflection and comparison against what I had already written. This was safe ground.

I read it.
I also read about it.

On March 6, 1960, Edmund Fuller (no less), wrote a full-page review of the book in Magazine of Books for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ‘It is projected into the future – it has elements in common with science fiction, yet it would be quite impossible to classify it narrowly as such. It is fanciful, yet as deeply true as any book I’ve read. It brilliantly combines several qualities: It is prodigiously imaginative and original, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all, is simply a memorable story as to stay with a reader for years.’
At the end of that same month, the comparatively tiny Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle would write, ‘The conjunction of day-to-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men – all viewed under the aspect of eternity – makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.’ The review continues with a brief biography of Miller, noting that he ‘enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of World War II as a radio operator and gunner. He participated in 55 combat sorties, among these was the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western World.’
Those who know the book and its author also know that it was Miller’s participation in this raid that led him, in part, to write Canticle. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, ‘the story of another abbey with a somewhat parallel history.’
The part left unsaid in the reviews was that the abbey at Montecassino, Italy was erected in AD 529 outside of Rome. The Allies bombed it thinking the Germans had occupied it. After destroying it, the Germans did occupy it. The Battle of Montecassino was comprised of four assaults between January and May of 1944. Some 55,000 allied casualties resulted, and 22,000 German.
The monks of the abbey had copied and accumulated forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. All were destroyed.
The abbey had been filled with hundreds of civilians who had fled there as a sanctuary.
Miller was one of the people who killed them.

Whatever the size of the publication, and wherever the book went, the reviews were all positive. In The Gazette, in Montreal, Canada, Phyllis Reeve wrote that Canticle ‘transcends the bounds of any fiction, impudently invading those of poetry and philosophy’, and in The Guardian out of London, Roy Perrott wrote in April of 1960, ‘… by AD 3700 the world is ready for another atomic war. The people and politicians have learned nothing; the scientists have passed the buck again; religion is nowhere. Platitudes of our time, perhaps, but Mr. Miller gives them room to breathe in a forceful and ingenious way. A deeply interesting book.’
Despite the universal acclaim and favourable comparisons to A Brave New World and 1984 among major fictional works of political philosophy, Miller disappeared almost entirely from the literary stage. By 1966 – a mere seven years after publication – Edward Ducharme at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a piece for English Journal (an academic periodical) and notes that, ‘[i]t went through several printings and was finally published as a paperback by Bantam in 1961. Since then it has died the death of most best-sellers.’
Ducharme, though, was only partly correct. For one thing, Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961. For another – and with the benefit of decades of data and hindsight – we can now see that Miller’s book did not actually die; not by a long shot. Despite his being a recluse and not publishing another novel in his lifetime, Canticle would go on to sell two million copies over thirty-seven years until his death in 1996 and would also inspire — seemingly at random — staged theatrical productions in small towns and even a fifteen-part NPR radio production in 1981 adapted by John Reeves (which we can still listen to on Old Time Radio, https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A...)
Now, in 2020 – though I don’t have sales figures – it is still in print and selling well on Amazon, which is at least indicative. Those with access to Bookscan data can add the needed footnote here.
What is notable, however, is that talk of the book seems to have fallen into near silence, despite the themes it elevated being now central to science fiction (aside from one excellent piece in The New Yorker in 2014 by Jon Michaud that drew on many of the scant sources I too have found). How many of our stories today — from The Terminator to The Matrix to West World — are centrally concerned with whether we will ever have the wisdom to control the technological demons our minds create?
Looking through thousands of newspapers and archives on Newspapers.com as well as JSTOR and of course Google, I was struck by the utter lack of institutional engagement with this novel, whereas Huxley and Orwell are household names. Where is it being used in high school or college curricula? Where are the references to it as a benchmark in science fiction? Where are the novelists and screenwriters who credit that book with their inspiration or ideas? Surely there are instances, but there is no trend. In 1997, when David Streitfeld wrote his piece on the death of Miller, he entitled it, 'Canticle' author unsung even in death. Between then and now, I would posit that little has changed.
To be sure, the Huxley and Orwell comparisons can be over-stated. Their output as writers was incomparably greater, as was their public engagement. But Orwell was dead in 1950 and Huxley famously died the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. So – not to be cheeky about it, but – they didn't do much publishing after 1961 either.
So why is Miller still unsung?
Much of the blame, if that’s the word, seems to lie with Miller himself. ‘“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,” said writer Joe Haldeman, the closest thing Miller had to a friend in the science fiction world,’ according to Streitfeld of the Washington Post in October, 1997. ‘I don't know how many people he felt responsible for killing [during World War II], but it was a lot.’
The PTSD and depression isolated Miller from the world. ‘Miller's long-time agent, Don Congdon, said Miller was “the only client I never met, although we talked a lot,”’ Streitfeld explained.
Miller’s wife died two years earlier. By 1996, Miller had had enough.
With 90% of his second and final novel completed (which would be published posthumously), Miller called the police in Dayton Beach on January 9, 1996 at 8:29 a.m. and said there was a dead man on his front lawn. They arrived three minutes later at 8:32. ‘They found the 72-year old writer sitting in a chair on his lawn, dead from a bullet to the brain.’
Miller’s problems and reclusiveness, however, can’t shoulder all the blame for our amnesia about this book.
Streitfeld noted that ‘the first surprising thing about Miller’s suicide is that even now, 20 months after the fact [in 1997], it hasn't been widely reported. No obituary ever appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. His children apparently wanted the information kept secret, and they largely succeeded.’
If there is a final conspirator in our amnesia it is the rest of us. It might be natural to take for granted the ideas that shape us, but there’s virtue in remembering and going back to core documents and concepts to better ensure that the conversations that define us remain anchored, rich, enlightened, and progressive.

I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was imaginative and playful and bold. It seemed to be uninhibited by any fear of censure or criticism like all great novels and works of art. It wasn’t only the ideas. I liked the characters, I liked the settings, I was swept away by the story. My criticisms, and I have some, are best discussed in person rather than in print; I’m not a critic.
What I did find was that my reading of Canticle was different from many others. Miller may have been compared to Huxley and Orwell, but when I read it I thought of The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947), The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951), and of course, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which was written between 1953 and 1961.
The other book I thought of (which I also consider a war novel) is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, published a decade later in 1969.
These were books about war. And not only war in general, but World War II specifically. Canticle was not. Not by any reading. So why did it strike me this way?
I think the answer lies with Emily Dickinson who once wrote ‘tell the truth but tell it slant —‘ and ended her poem (1263) with, ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—’
Canticle, like Slaughter-house Five in my opinion, was a war novel told slant.
Interestingly, even Miller himself didn’t notice it at the time. Jon Michaud wrote, “By his own admission, the Miller [sic] did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. ‘I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,’ Miller recalled. ‘Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
While Vonnegut integrated his experiences from the firebombing of Dresden into his science fiction(esque) story, Miller didn’t — not explicitly. Instead, he injected his fears, his theology, his philosophy, his terror, and his sense of dread. He wrote about it using the only medium he could: Science fiction.
I’m speculating, but I think this happened for a number of reasons, some personal and some social.
We already know that Miller wasn't able to deal with his depression and pain from the war. So his need to come at the truth from any direction other than head-on might be obvious. And while I don’t want to psychologize his philosophy, because I think that would be an injustice to the depth of this reflection, I can't help but imagine Miller on 55 bombing sorties during World War II — a time when the likelihood of surviving 25 missions was extremely low — and wondering what that did to his view of the world. You take off. You fly a straight line to the bomb target where flak tries to kill you and often does. You kill people you never knew and will never see and will never atone for, and then you fly straight back. And then you repeat this another 54 times. Is it a wonder that his views of humanity represents a linear path from knowledge to destruction, only to be repeated over and over again if the destruction was not complete?
Even with this, I think there’s more to the story.
At some point, the canonical literature on any historical event begins to tie-off and the attention — of the agents, the editors, the publishers, the booksellers, the critics, the reading public — moves on. This happened with WWII literature. It happened with Vietnam literature. It happened with The Gulf War. Many will remember the key September 11 novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) and Falling Man by Don DeLillo (2007). It happened there too. Today, no one can write a ‘September 11’ novel anymore. It's too late. One can mention the events, but the literature is closed.
And yet, even after a literature has been tied off, the compulsion to write among writers lives on. It is little wonder to me that after the most explicit and realistic fiction about World War II, great writers like Miller or Vonnegut started turning to science fiction as the domain in which to explore the themes, philosophies, counter-factuals, emotions, and pain that was left behind in a world that no longer wanted novelistic expression of that war. In fact, I think that one of science fiction's greatest attributes is to be the last domain where all great ideas are welcomed and where neither time nor space will inhibit the exploration of what still matters.

I had a fresh reading of Miller’s book and I knew his fate. I wanted to say to him, ‘You didn't just write a book. You started a conversation about hope and possibility as we contend with knowledge and ignorance, reason and morality, conflict and cooperation. I thank you for that and for placing those things at the center of science fiction. You then abandoned all of that and eventually yourself but I'm not letting you off that easy because the conversation is bigger than you. It's current. It's pressing. And as best I can tell, it is also unattended. So forgive me, but Radio Life is going to pick up the baton you discarded."

Hubris? Arrogance? I didn't much care and still don’t. Sometimes the person who moves an agenda forward is simply the one who cares enough to try.

I finished writing the screenplay with some modest influences from Miller. I loved the story but the screenplay was weak. I soon decided that the only way to really attend to what was on my mind was to write a proper novel. I am, after all, a novelist. So I got started.


Though in conversation with Canticle, Radio Life was no homage, no sequel, no parallel, no competitor. However, it was a conversation between two books that I wanted to make explicit. Now I had a chance to give both Miller (and poor, hapless brother Francis) a better end.
In Part IV I elevated Miller's Brother Francis (who was eaten by cannibals, "eat! eat!") to the Abbott in Radio Life (it isn't Francis himself, of course, as they are very different men but I adopted the name), and I created an abbey in the forest (not the desert) defined by joy and humanity and hope, not devotion or work. That abbey was made possible by Miller's as his — in its way — was forced into being by Montecassino. And so destruction begets creation, and creation inspires new possibilities. The lives and loss at Montecassinno (or anywhere) can never be recovered. But what we do with the memories and remains define us. Which, of course, is what Radio Life is all about.
As I wrote the ending I had the privilege of comparing my own philosophies and education with Miller's in order to sharpen the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic enactments — the scenes, the dialogues, the debates. The reason I could do this without fear of re-writing Miller’s book (so to speak) is because I see things differently than Miller did.
I never dropped bombs on people but I was under missile attack for over a month in Israel during the Gulf War in ‘91. I never served in the military, but I studied alongside mid-career military officers when I earned an MA in national security studies at Georgetown. Unlike Miller, I didn’t lament the absence of peace in our world and bury my head on apocalyptica (let’s call that a word) but worked for a decade at the United Nations on disarmament, peace, and security after earning a doctorate in international relations. And along the way I learned a few things relevant to my implicit debates with Canticle. To wit: I know, that the development of new technologies is not linear but contingent. The directions we take are a function of the values we hold and sustain through time as a culture, as well the resources we choose to allocate at specific moments in time as a polity. We could develop better chemical and biological warfare weapons, or blinding laser weapons, or exploding bullets, but they are banned by international convention and law and we do not. Even if they are developed in secret, that development is hampered by international norms and also by the values we teach our children who will later choose a career path of their own and hopefully will not want to develop such weapons because they are bad.
We could have developed new technologies for perfecting genocide and the eradication of swaths of humanity so that we might be more efficient than the Nazis were. We have not done this — not because we can't improve on the speed of murder as it was performed until 1945 — but because we are outraged by the Holocaust and will resist this rather than perfect it.
And then there are our failures. We might have cured cancer by now if we'd been as dedicated to that goal as increasing GDP. We might have eradicated malaria if wealthy and northern nations had considered the suffering of others as though they were our family and not distant strangers, but we haven't made those investments or directed our attention to those ostensibly-achievable goals either.
Inevitability, linearity, and determinism are easiest to believe when you are hindered from seeing the range of other possibilities. Many things hinder us. Our characters and personalities. Our cultures and conversations. Our imperatives and problems. Sometimes, simply our imaginations. But this is why we have to rely on each other; to break through the walls that contain us to reach the betterment on the other side. Stories can do that because we need the greatest imaginations to show us what is possible, what is desirable, and what is not.
Miller was a pessimist. I am no optimist but instead embrace the reality of uncertainty to find possibility. Faced with the truth of our own limitations, I encourage us to both imagine more and get our hands on the wheel of our fate.
I would have liked to tell Miller that what is possible is made possible by who we are and what we value; by what we will do to have a certain life. Technology itself will not doom us. Abandoning our values and humanity as the mechanisms to direct it, however, absolutely will. So in this way, I believe Miller was wrong about the linear relationship between thought and destruction. And I wish he'd known that and believed it. Though it didn’t set out to be and is not limited to this, I nevertheless see Radio Life as a response to the suicide letter Miller never wrote and the book that he did.

— Derek B. Miller

On 29 February professor Agnes Callard published (though dated 2 Dec. 2023) “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is,” ending with the worrying — and seemingly dismissive claim that — "No one can genuinely ask a question to which she thinks she already has the answer,” which intends to tell us that not knowing the value of the Humanities is OK and perhaps more intellectually appropriate than knowing.

Her thesis is, "I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy."

As it happens, I think it is not OK not to know the value of what you're teaching, and that it is intellectually disingenuous to pretend otherwise. In fact, I think it is essential to communicate that value to others. So here is my answer after a brief mention of who I am and how I know:

I have a doctorate in International Relations and I’m now a rather respected novelist. I was a senior researcher and project manager at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research for about a decade. I remain connected to numbers think tanks including one at the Pell Center at Salve Regina, another at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and a third — as a design fellow — at the Somali Public Agenda’s Policy Lab in Mogadishu.

I know exactly what the value of the humanities is, because I have worked with (i.e. tried to get real problems solved with) people who did or did not have a background in the humanities and I saw the consequences of that. In other words, my answer is not philosophical or deductive: it is empirical (though I long for a wider data set).

By "problems" I mean, for example, the reintegration of excombatants after wars and conflicts; the integration of refugees into economic life; the reduction of gender-based (i.e. sex-based) violence in war; arms control and disarmament with disparate societies, from Yemeni tribes to Russia, and the list goes on.

My expertise over some twenty professional years in IR was designing and planning projects, programs, and policies that can have positive social impacts in the communities where they were implemented. My focus was on method; Not what to do, but how to successfully design what to do across cultural systems.

My projects were usually on peace and security but I have worked in development and humanitarian affairs too.

As the years rolled on, I stopped taking interns with backgrounds in political science, conflict resolution, peace studies, development studies, and even security studies favoring instead students with degrees in English, literature, religion, and philosophy.

I did not do this because — as professor Callard speculated — "the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy."

No. I didn't care about any of that and I didn't expect to see that when they walked in the door.

Rather, every single intern I took on with a background in the humanities showed up with a core understanding of something the others were almost beyond the capacity to learn: an understanding that the world is comprised of a plurality of social and moral and ideational systems; that those systems are stable but not immutable; and that any meaningful engagement with another society requires attention to the premises, practices, and meanings that organize and animate — but also sustain — that community through time and, crucial. In understanding this, they also knew that the next step was comparison, because our own lives are also part of a distinct culture.

They may not have been taught to phrase it that way, but they “get it.”

They "get" that things are different in different places and that things change in the same place through time. They understand that action is reposed on, and animated by, thought. The humanities did not merely teach them ideas: it taught them how much ideas matter.

In HG Well’s time machine, the passenger did not move, but rather could venture backwards and forwards in the very same spot. When the pilot left the machine two hundred years earlier in the same room, she was effectively in a different world with different rules, and different primary structuring ideas.

In the same vein, what is true in a place through time is also true across places contemporaneously. Peru is not China, nor is China Canada. What turns a “space into a place” is the people, and what makes the people different is essential to understanding where you are and how that world works.

To what does this matter?

Or better yet, to what does this not matter?

Interested in AI? You’d better start understanding the plurality of socio-cultural systems because what is “intelligent” here is not the same as what is “intelligent there. You think the universalist engineers are going to "get it" having no background in the humanities? Forget it.

Interested in sales? Service design? Team dynamics? Innovation? Cooperation?

Progress?

If so, our students will need to learn what Clifford Geertz called, “an understanding of understandings not our own.” That means we need to know where our perspectives and ideas come from (Homer, Greece, religion, theology, law, interaction with other societies) and also know how our own ways of thinking relate to systems of thought elsewhere. That is far more than "critical thinking." It is an education.

America, and indeed Western civilization, is not going to be economically competitive or wisely run if we mask the challenges of the world in what Harald Lasswell called make-believe universalism.

Instead, we must attend to the differences.

The humanities is not only necessary but it is the gateway with the widest aperture for teaching students a habit of mind and an orientation to thinking that will eventually be necessary to save us all from extinction.

Now: Who wants to fund THAT?