Literary Links

Brain oscillations reveal dynamic shifts in creative thought during metaphor generation

Since I’ve written earlier about metaphors as novel titles, this article fascinated me. It reports on recent research into “the neural mechanisms behind metaphor generation, a creative skill that plays an important role in how people understand complex concepts and communicate abstract ideas.”

The Neuroscience of Murderbot’s Cyborg Brain

I admit that I’ve haven’t read Martha Wells’s Murderbot series or seen the new Apple TV+ show based on the books—yet. But I am interested in the questions about human consciousness and its relationship to robots/machines, so of course I’m going to look at articles like this one. Allison Parshall, an associate editor at Scientific American and self-proclaimed “Murderbot fan and brain science nerd,” explains what kind of creature Murderbot features:

a main character made of cloned human tissue and robot hardware. It isn’t a human, and it isn’t a bot; it’s something in-between called a “construct.” It can see with security cameras or with its eyes; it can talk to computer systems with code and humans with language; its digital memory can be wiped by its creators, but its biological memory clings to traumatic flashes that can’t be purged. It does not always understand human emotions, yet it feels, deeply.

Here she writes about her consultations with neuroscientists “to understand how this seamless integration of brain and computer might work.”

The Reason Murderbot’s Tone Feels Off

“Martha Wells’ book series uses wry humor to tell a story about artificial intelligence, humanity, and free will. The Apple TV+ adaptation tries to do the same—with mixed results.”

Angela Watercutter, Wired’s senior editor for special projects, focuses on why she’s not completely pleased with the Apple TV+ series’ choice of Alexander Skarsgård as the actor to portray the main character.

Gateway Books

“The lessons of a defunct canon”

After spending his adolescence as “an aspiring intellectual,” Timothy Aubry went to college, where he learned to scoff at the writers and books he had revered while growing up and replaced them with more intellectual fare. He then became an English professor and found himself “teaching my students the same preferences that I learned in college.”

He calls the books he loved as a teenager—“the white male middlebrow canon (Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Hesse, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, Tolkien, Wolfe, etc.)”—gateway books that turned him into a life-long reader. Here he examines what such books have to offer and why they are important.

Include as Little History as You Can: The Danger of Explaining Too Much in Historical Fiction

For a long time I avoided reading much historical fiction because I feared that I usually wouldn’t know enough about the time period to assess how accurately an author presented it. It turns out I needn’t have worried. Novelist Jesse Browner explains why.

Social media is influencing how authors promote their books. Here’s how

To blurb or not to blurb? That’s the question Brittney Melton addresses for NPR. When writers spend the time to read someone else’s book in order to write a blurb, they are short changing their own writing time. One possible change might be having book bloggers and social media influencers rather than fellow authors write the blurbs.

Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle

This was one of the publishing industry’s biggest stories recently:

The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist.

At Least Two Newspapers Syndicated AI Garbage

Over at The Atlantic, Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel dig a little deeper into the occurrence described in the article above, tracing at least some of the problem to a freelancer named Marco Buscaglia, who “admitted to using ChatGPT for his work.”

We’re Focused on the Wrong A.I. Problem in Journalism

“It’s not bots writing the news. It’s the bots reading it.”

In a related article, Henry Grabar writes in Slate about what he calls “a sprawling, newspaper-length hallucination of ChatGPT.” As AI bots write more and more of the news, which is then scraped by other AI bots, the loss of human readers to analyze what is written enables the propagation of invalidated information.

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown