Bob's Journal

After four years of hard work with a well-known New York City literary agent, around Christmas 1999, I gave up on the traditional route and decided to publish my first novel, a Silicon Valley cyberpunk thriller called Acts of the Apostles, myself.

Ava Glass thought she had made her first work friend. An American now living in London, she had just started her first job as a civil servant, working in counter-terrorism communications. She was waiting for security clearance when, one morning, about three weeks in, she got talking to a colleague in the kitchen. The woman was in her late 20s, and also new, she said.  Read more

Before I became a full-time writer, I spent a decade working as a criminal defence attorney. It was rewarding, exhausting, heart-breaking work. I'm glad not to be practising any longer, but I also feel lucky to have had the experiences I did during those years.  Read more

The Authors Guild and 17 authors including George R R Martin, John Grisham and Jodie Picoult have filed a class-action suit against OpenAI for copyright infringement of their works of fiction and "on behalf of a class of fiction writers whose works have been used to train GPT".  Read more

A specter is haunting the landscape-the specter of generative AI. First came fears that student cheating would explode, plus that artists and actors would be unemployed. Then the ante was upped: Some of the very technology's creators warned that AI's potential risk to humanity as we know it was on par with pandemics and nuclear war.