The 100 Novels That Shaped Our World (According to the BBC…)

 

Well, here’s an interesting list, courtesy of BBC Arts.

The 100 Novels That Shaped Our World, split into handy categories Identity / Love, Sex & Romance / Adventure / Life, Death & Other Worlds / Politics, Power & Protest / Class & Society / Coming Of Age / Family & Friendship / Crime & Conflict  and last but not least, Rule Breakers, all chosen by a panel of 6.

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The panel are Radio 4 Front Row presenter and Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell, broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, authors Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal and Alexander McCall Smith, and Bradford Festival Literary Director Syima Aslam

Great to see City Of Bohane by Kevin Barry in there, although surprising Weaveworld by Clive Barker didn’t make the cut  #mybooklife

Read the full list below…

The 100 Novels That Shaped Our World

Fast Flash Workshop – Kathy Fish

Just finished a hugely enjoyable 10 day Fast Flash workshop with  @kathyfish (and a guest appearance from @megiddings) plus a group of great writers.

It was a lot of fun –

I wrote more in 2 weeks than I have in 2 years.. kathy-fish.com

Highly recommended, thank you.

Give It ten Years And AI Will Be Posting This For You

With the release of OpenAI’s GPT-2 – a sophisticated text generator deemed too dangerous for public consumption – it seems having to go to the effort of writing anything yourself could soon become a thing of the past.

Indeed – this whole blog post could have been written by a fledgling AI engine.

Who knows?

The answer doesn’t matter, to be honest. Give it ten years, maybe 20, and AI will be writing 75% of the world’s content anyway; and with a huge capacity for learning from and improving on written text, who’s to say AI won’t soon be writing better stuff than most humans.

In fact, it’s almost incomprehensible that AI will fail to surpass anything ever written by the limited human brain.

AI will own our future text; it will happen. Just give it time.

So, for more information and to take the opportunity to play around with a very limited, early example of the future – go here.

[No robots were harmed in the writing of this post]