A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containg recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read. Some of my books are listed. Since this is the season of Thanksgiving, I’ll start by saying that I genuinely appreciate the plug! However, I was taken aback by the statement highlighted in the screen grab below:
“…most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence).”
I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.
I’m not surprised or perturbed by the underlying sentiment. Some of my endings have been controversial for a long time. Tastes differ. Some readers would prefer more conclusive endings. Now, in some cases, such as Snow Crash, I simply can’t fathom why any reader could read the ending—a long action sequence in which the Big Bad is defeated, the two primary antagonists meet their maker and Y.T. is reconciled and reunited with her mother—as anything other than a proper wind-up to the story. In other cases, notably The Diamond Age and Seveneves, I can understand why readers who prefer a firm conclusion would end up being frustrated. It is simply not what I was trying to do in those books. So, for a long time, people have argued about some of my endings, and that’s fine.
In this case, though, we have a big company explicitly stating that several of my best-known books just stop mid-sentence, and putting in the word “literally” to eliminate any room for interpretive leeway.
This isn’t literary criticism, which consists of statements of opinion. This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.
It is interesting to speculate as to how such an assertion found its way onto A16Z’s website!
Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker
By far the most plausible explanation is that this verbiage was generated by an AI and then copy-pasted into the web page by a human who didn’t bother to fact-check it. This would explain the misspelling of my name and some peculiarities in the writing style. Of course, this kind of thing is happening all the time now in law, academia, journalism, and other fields, so it’s pretty unremarkable; it just caught my attention because it’s the first time it’s directly affected me.
The flow diagram looks like this:
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