Arthur Phillips on fiction

 

Arthur Phillips is one of my favorite writers working today. Perhaps his background as a jazz saxophonists or his record as a five-time Jeopardy champion informs his work, since he has six novels under his belt, and no two are alike in genre, style, or subject matter. He's an inspiration to any writer hoping to break out of the single-genre ghetto.

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?" 

Favorite works

The Egyptologist

Prague

Angelica

My Musical Miseducation

 

I missed the boat on music, and it still rankles. Let me say up front that, had things gone differently, I would not have become a musical prodigy, a rock star, or even a lounge singer with a baby blue tuxedo and a coke habit. There’s not a music molecule hiding anywhere in my DNA. But I might have at least been musically literate. Or what’s audio equivalent of literacy?

Grand Theft Voice

 Let’s try an experiment. Read the following quote by Morgan Freeman.

When you read it, did you hear Morgan Freeman’s distinctive baritone? Likely. There are memes all over the internet that ask you that very same question. It’s the natural outcome of having such a well-known voice and style.

But, as you may have guessed, that’s not actually a Morgan Freeman quote. It’s from Malcolm X. (And if you try to say it now in Malcolm X’s voice, you may find yourself actually borrowing Denzel Washington's voice in playing Malcolm X. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock: Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

So we could say I borrowed Morgan Freeman’s voice for this little thought experiment. Or nearer the mark would be to say I appropriated it. But to be truthful, I stole it. I stole Freeman’s likability, his air of authority, professionalism, and integrity. With Morgan Freeman, such antics are usually in the name of fun, but reassigning attribution of quotes to someone with more authority or a wider audience is endemic on the internet. Figures from Thomas Jefferson to Kurt Vonnegut have been misappropriated in this fashion. There have been a rash of pronouncements supposedly by the new pope that never passed his lips. I’m probably not telling you anything new here.

But now here’s an honest-god-quote from The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, a recent book by AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman:

Mutants

 

Maybe it's time we talked about mutants. No, not cool mutants with cool powers. I'm talking about the ever-growing minority who seem to have been born without the gene for empathy. Call them homo miserabilis. How long have they been among us? Are they here to stay? Does their mutation give them an advantage over homo sapiens that will eventually write our demise as a species? Is there some sort of treatment we can administer? Can we co-exist with them? I would have preferred mutations like eye-blasts and teleportation, and would have gotten along fine with our blue furry cousins. But evolution is an asshole.

Okay, maybe these narcissists—let’s call them what they are— aren’t mutants, but I became curious about the seeming decline of empathy, which a lot of people seem to have noticed and become alarmed by. Is all the evidence simply anecdotal? Turns out not. Here are two developments: