the fiction.

The official home of Unfiction.net

Storytelling predates the wheel and the use of fire. 

Only storytelling allows us to bring the dead to life, go back or forward in time and breach the speed of light. I love that. Stories also allow us to see what's really behind the curtain, along with Alice. On this site you will find my storytelling works in progress.

A project in need of renewal thanks to the arrival of ChatGPT

The fiction project shown here in fragments was from an anthology with the working title of “Bedtime Stories for Artificial Intelligences”. It was conceived in 2020 and 2021, well and truly before the emergence of AI in the 21st Century sense, or talk of LLMs. In some ways the emergence of LLMs has made these works remarkably naive and almost quaint.

It was to be a collection of loosely connected narrative threads that could be read individually, or together. I was inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Italian Folktales, and Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad. In my opinion the most successful story is Mask of Happiness I. You may disagree.

The stories need refreshing now - but for the time being, I will let them stand as an artefact from the pandemic - a moment in time when Artificial Intelligence was not understood the way it is now in the era of Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT.