I am not sure I belive the story about thr manuscript however. It surfaced just as the Internet was becoming a thing. Coincidence?
And I don’t see why the Internet is relevant: not everything that happened since the mid-1980s are internet-related conspiracies.
I was very glad to re-read it when:
https://www.usni.org/press/books/20000-leagues-under-sea
was published.
Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).
Here's a site - ignore the warnings about the certificate - showing some of these images: https://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/illustr/
https://janbecke.com/portfolio-item/paris/
Take from that what you will.
I never saw it, but after reading the synopsis [1], that appears to be fortunate.
There is worse. Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel.[2] Vaguely Verne-inspired. Very vaguely.
I found The Nautilus series to be a rather decent treatment of Verne's book, and it has a 6.8 rating on IMDB [1], and a 79% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes [2]. Would have liked to see a second season to explore Verne's exposition a bit more. Missed opportunities, I guess. Maybe AI can help tell that storyline in the future even though it may not have made sense to the studios.
While his predictions about technology were way more accurate for the 1960s (his intended target), his predictions about society and culture are prescient for the 2020's with the advent of generative AI
> "With Montaigne and maybe Rabelais it was What Do I Know? In the nineteenth century it was What Does It Matter to Me? And nowadays we say: How Much Does It Earn?"
For me, this also summarizes the introduction of the Internet to the masses, all the way to the present day.
THE BLAKE SNYDER BEAT SHEET
PROJECT TITLE:
GENRE:
DATE:
1. Opening Image (1): 2. Theme Stated (5):
3. Set-up (1-10):
4. Catalyst (12):
5. Debate (12-25):
6. Break into Two (25) 7. B Story (30):
8. Fun and Games (30-55):
9. Midpoint (55):
10. Bad Guys Close In (55-75):
11. All Is Lost (75):
12. Dark Night of the Soul (75-85):
13. Break into Three (85):
14. Finale (85-110):
15. Final Image (no):
Page 51 here: https://ia800109.us.archive.org/31/items/snyder-blake-save-t...
As an example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Michel and his professor friend going through a long list of nineteenth-century authors and passing judgment on them. You would expect this to be the thinly disguised opinions of Jules Verne, but no, it's the thinly disguised opinions of Verne's editor, which Verne included in the hopes that it would help the book get published. Obviously, this was not successful.
I have a theory about Verne that's strongly based on this book. He is sometimes called a technological visionary, but most of the inventions of his books were already known at his time (the first submarine was made in 1620, Around the World in Eighty Days is likely based on an itinerary in a magazine Verne read, etc.), and what was not known, Verne often made work using lots of artistic license (like the giant gun from the Earth to the Moon, which would kill the passengers with the acceleration; Verne did not invent rockets). No, Verne's genius was that he took the progress that was already visible and used it to create adventures, that he created a vision of the future where all this technology is used to explore deep underground caves and the sea floor and outer space and find fascinating things there. And Paris in the Twentieth Century is the negative version of this, a world where technological progress does not expand imagination, but instead limits it, as everything gets economically optimised to death. It's a good warning to keep in mind.
Ignore the debates about quality. This means that this article's message is a lie; all of the opinions expressed here come not from a human, perhaps an inhabitant of Paris, but from a machine. The salvation suggested in the form of Parisian 1960s poets does not come from someone who likes to read them, but from a machine reporting on its training data. (Here it's not controversial -- what else can an LLM know about a poet besides what has been written about them?)
I feel like exploring a cave now.
[1] The 20% flagged as human is mostly direct quotations from the book, which is a nice sign that Pangram isn't making things up randomly.
I read a comment elsewhere speculating that the article was written by AI. It could be, but it also shows that authors have to now go extra lengths to prove what they write is not from a machine.
I am afraid future of art is bleak. Poems hand written by poets will be competing with machines. Movies by Nolan and AI probably would not be easily distinguishable. Would we still pay for human made movies when AI can generate one for us, with the ending and style we want?
Of course there will be value to human generated content, but probably much less than how it is today. It will be probably niche like art work for millionaires to boast than for masses to consume.
In that sense, I would say Verne was right to be worried.
We find art that is fun and interesting and unexpected and it expands what we are. That's one of the purposes of art. Watching something predictable eventually gets your survival boredom instinct to kick in. Is this not a common experience?
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iwo4-wcodpM&pp=0gcJCXICo7VqN5tD
Some people do not like tragic endings while they love the premise of the movie. Some have issues where violence in movies could disturb them for days. So to be able to take a premise while toning down on violence and having a happy ending would be attractive for many people. There is a reason why many hollywood movies are variations of Americans saving world with a happy ending. Movies with tragic endings or challenging preconceived notions are not going to be successful.
In that sense, we would be able to make our own offbeat movies with intersting premises, instead of watching the usual movies prefered by average movie goers.
If it isn't obvious already, it should become obvious soon that economics and society as a whole will need to change. People will still want to do people things, like make art for example, but the need to monetize their work will have to go away.
There are many hobbyists that do things for the pleasure of doing them, and by that definition most human activities will become hobbies, done for pleasure and the sake of doing them, not for monetary/economic value.
The (economic) grind of artists painstakingly creating scenes for The Simpsons - which is already outsourced to cheaper overseas locations - will no longer be a human domain; and as I understand it, is not even currently in the domain of US-based artists and is instead being done in South Korean animation studios [1]. Does that mean US artists have disappeared?
There are large communities that come together for non-economic activities. History re-enactors for example. So hierarchy, organization, etc. will continue, just not for pecuniary work. A potential model for this is outlined in The Culture of Iain M. Banks' sci-fi, with the idea being that eliminating the economic necessity of work does not eliminate the human desire to accomplish [2].
I prefer the rosier outlook over the dystopian one. Society could go either way. We shall see.
[1] https://responsejournal.net/issue/2024-11/feature/between-se... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
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