A Nigerian prince just gave me £20

Checking my email spam, I've had a sort of he pulls a knife, AI pulls a gun moment.

I've blogged previously regarding the slew of phishing scams aimed at writers. Jaine Fenn, who I met on Slab Press's online launch of Screams and Wails a few days ago, clearly has had similar experiences.

Now AI seems to have upped its game by offering half-decent - or, at least, making-me-stop-and-think-about-it - marketing advice for my new collection The Lucky Ones Will be Replaced by Software within the mashed-up ones and zeros tied to the end of the fishing line. Sort of like getting your first baggie of heroin for free.

See what you think about this email from 'Claire Hephzibah' who, at first glance, is either a real book promoter or has a sufficiently rich online presence to suggest as much.

Robert,

The detail that stayed with me was not the title or the novella. It was the fact that "Sunrunner" was selected for Best of British Science Fiction 2022. That is not a small thing. That is the British science fiction establishment, through Donna Scott and NewCon Press, telling the field that your story was one of the best of the year. And that story is in this book.

Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?

And then I looked at the Amazon listing, and I saw a collection with no reviews, filed under "Single Authors" short stories, with the Best of British credential buried in the middle of the description. A reader who loves speculative short fiction is not browsing that shelf, and the one fact that would make them stop scrolling is not leading the page.

Fair criticism on the shelving - I'll talk to the publisher. But I take issue with the 'buried' reference given only 29 words precede 'The Best of British Science Fiction' in the blurb.

There is a second issue. You have a body of work. 24 0s & a 2. My Thoughts are with You. 2084. Five appearances in the Best of British anthologies. A thirty-year track record. A reader who finishes one of these twenty-four stories has no clear, immediate path to the rest of your catalogue. The collection is an orphan when it should be a doorway.

Or they could click on Amazon's author link...

And there is a third thing. You wrote for the BBC, for national newspapers, and for government ministers as a speechwriter. You stood for parliament for the Green Party in 2024. You have a story that people in the field already know. That is not a biography. That is the reason a certain reader will trust you before they read a word of the fiction.

I think we need a certain perspective here...

The strategy I would propose is not an ad campaign. It is a repositioning from a standalone collection to the entry point of a recognised body of short fiction.

Glad it's not an ad campaign. I don't think I'm billboard-suitable.

First, rewrite the description to lead with the Best of British credential. Tell the reader plainly: this collection includes "Sunrunner," selected for Best of British Science Fiction 2022, alongside twenty-three other stories from a writer who has been publishing in the field since the early 1990s.

So, jump that up from the middle of the first, three-and-a-half line paragraph, to its start. And that's where I've been going wrong, is it?

Second, move the book out of the generic "Single Authors" shelf and into Science Fiction > Short Stories, Horror > Short Stories, and Fantasy > Collections & Anthologies, where the readers who want exactly this are already browsing. 

You'd think Claire would know books can sit on three shelves on Amazon, and, for this volume, the other two are 'Collections & Anthologies' for both science fiction and fantasy. So, one shelf she's advocating already applies, and the other isn't dissimilar.

Third, bundle the three collections into a "Complete Short Fiction" set, and link each individual volume to the bundle, so a reader who finishes one is handed the rest without searching.

The Incomplete Robert Bagnall vols 1 to 3. I quite like it...

Fourth, and this costs nothing, use your own blog and your platform to tell the readers who already follow your work that the new collection is here and that the Best of British story is inside it.

I think I'd remember doing that. Oh, I did!

The counterintuitive part of this strategy is that it treats the Best of British selection not as a past achievement but as the reason to read the book right now. You did not just publish another collection. You published a book that contains a story the field has already recognised. The readers who need that are already looking for it. The bridge between the credential and the listing has not been built yet.

Can a past achievement not also be a reason to read the book right now? Is this a build it and they will come thing? Does calling it 'counterintuitive' make it more alluring when the phrase doesn't really add up to very much at all?

I would love to send a short proposal with the specific moves I have in mind. If any of this is worth a conversation, reply with interested and I will send it through and explain the strategy properly.

I bet you would...

Either way, the care you put into these stories is visible on every page. You are not writing to fit a trend. You are writing speculative fiction that the Best of British anthologies keep coming back to, and that is a body of work worth finding the readers for.

So nice of the algorithm to say so...

It's worth taking a look at Claire Hephzibah's website (and, cunningly, her email didn't provide a link; I went looking for it to ascertain whether she existed). It's reminiscent of The Truman Show or The Game, or any other movie where reality turns out to be a theatre set. Look carefully. All the blog posts have the same date. The pictures smack of stock images. That interview with 'Jane Smith': the photo looks flat and false. And, if you look Jane's books up on goodreads.com... you can't find them.

And, if things couldn't get any more meta, AI suggests:

'Claire Hephzibah' is widely suspected or associated with pen names, composite/pseudonymous marketing entities, or online profiles that combine separate names (like Hephzibah or Claire found in various literary and local contexts) rather than a verified, publicly documented individual with a traditional public record.

Thanks, AI. But, genuinely, I had this already...

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

 

The Lucky Ones Will be Replaced by Software

Twenty-four speculative, science-fiction, horror, and otherwise hard to pigeonhole stories.

Includes the novella 'The Credo of Comrade January' and 'Sunrunner', selected for The Best of British Science Fiction 2022 ("An ending that will stay with me for a while" Amazon, "A beautiful story of artistic yearning and science. One of my favourites here" Goodreads).

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

 

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

The Lucky Ones Will be Replaced by Software

I'm enormously chuffed to report that William Holly have published a third - yes, third! - collection of my short stories, gathered up in the main from those that first appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines in 2022 and 2023.

Available NOW!! in ones and zeroes, or dead tree that is slightly less environmentally damaging than traditional dead tree, it's called The Lucky Ones Will be Replaced by Software and contains twenty-four speculative, science-fiction, horror and otherwise hard to pigeonhole stories.

These include the novella 'The Credo of Comrade January', and 'Sunrunner', selected for The Best of British Science Fiction 2022 ("An ending that will stay with me for a while" Amazon, "A beautiful story of artistic yearning and science. One of my favourites here" Goodreads).

With a bit of luck, I'll have some physical copies to wave in front of the camera at next weekend's online launch of Slab Press's Screams and Wails. It'd be great if you can join us - 7pm (GMT) on the 1st of November. If not - buy a copy of that one too!

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Democracy versus the machine

There's a bit of me tempted to simply copy and paste this article from the Guardian, with proper credit, of course (or maybe not; I haven't quite decided what I would have done) as it's the sort of thing I think, even if expressed in a far more erudite and articulate way than I can generally muster. (Feel free to disagree, of course).

For those of you for whom even an online newspaper article is tl;dr, here's my brief reading of what itself a short excerpt from The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, published by Allen Lane a couple of months ago:

We have a choice between a computopia of wisdom and enlightenment enabling all to live together in harmony, or the compudystopia of government by machine. The exponential growth in both processing power and digital data to process, controlled by the vested interests of those already holding power, has pushed us towards the latter future, accelerated (ironically) by our liberal democracy's reluctance to regulate.

And I thought I was curmudgeonly.

There's an angle to this which is in the article (and, I'm sure, in the book, which I haven't read), but appears consequential rather than as a  contributory factor in getting us to where we are. That is the particularly human trait of reverting to knuckle-dragging savagery when online.

Lepore quotes John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

“Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone...You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather … You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.”

And that's the problem. For every hippy thinking Cyberspace is one long meditative retreat, where we will settle our differences with reasonableness, finding common ground to grow flowers to stuff down the barrels of guns wielded by The Man, there are a dozen Neanderthals ready to punch your face in. The Man is delighted Cyberspace lies outside any mature jurisdiction because that means He can do whatever the fuck He wants.

Ghengis Khan is reckoned to have overseen the slaughter of ten million plus. Take a moment to think what that means for respect for human life. He had none - but, then again, life was nasty, brutish and short anyway. Now we've swung so far the other way we find it hard to even say somebody's died, reverting to euphemisms like nuns discussing erotica. But we remain Genghis Khan-ish online, masked and armoured behind usernames and avatars, essentially sending others who are kinda-us-but-not-us into battle, to troll with false facts and conspiracies. We have little respect for others' digital dignity. Even hippies only agree with other hippies.

The internet has not made us this way. What the internet has done is to allow us to shed the trappings of modern 'civilisation', which force us into being 'civilised' because that offers the best return (if I don't kick you when you're down, hopefully you won't kick me when I'm down), and revert to type. And type has more to do with our lizard brains than the single transferable vote and giving the winning coalition's policies time to bear fruit. We've not lost our safety wheels, we've lost our safety valve.

I think Lepore thinks we've gone too far down the road towards a compudystopia. I'm not convinced a computopia was ever even possible. Given several millennia of evidence, like dropping a fridge off a high tower, in my view it was only ever going to go in one direction.

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Screams and Wails

Those lovely people at Slab Press have just announced Screams and Wails, a music-inspired horror anthology, launching at Fantasycon in Glasgow in a few weeks time. And look whose name's second on the Main Stage running order, like Lizzo or Jack White at Glastonbury. Yes - me!

Okay, okay, so this running order is in alphabetical order, and Glastonbury use some other populist metric to decide on theirs. But, hey, maybe they should go from A to Z(ed) too...

 

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon). 

The Salmakki Resurrection

Just wanted to pass on news that The Daily Tomorrow have generously un-paywalled (their verb, I'm just borrowing it) their website so all their stories are now free to read, including January's The Salmakki Resurrection, my millennia-spanning tale confirming exactly why we were put on this rock hurtling through space in the first place.

Hope you enjoy it - and chapeau to the folks at The Daily Tomorrow.

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon). 

Rise of the eLuddite

I suspect many of you are outside looking in, consumers of content, tourists and travellers in the worlds we humble content creators build. I hope you're all having a good time, or as good a time as you want, as I'm sure those house-brick sized fantasy sagas count as masochistic endurance sports.

If, however, you are also on the inside, particularly if you share my wheelhouse, an un-agented writer penning short fiction, sending it out to strut its stuff and flaunt its tush to hard-nosed editors who may or (mainly) may not give it house room, you too will have seen a certain phenomena over the last five years or so.

The victimisation and persecution of AI.

In 'no blacks, no dogs, no Irish' style, virtually all submission guidelines require solemn declarations that the teller of the tale is solely and wholly the wetware between human ears with no further silicon-based assistance bar the spellchecker.

Steve Capone at Whisper House went one step further requiring those submitting to his Doom Scroll anthology to prove their submission hadn't been created by AI by, say, developing it in a single document, enabling version history to be accessed, like watching a time lapse video of a pervy sculptor finding the naked man with a very small cock that was always there within a block of marble.

Now, there's a whole other strand to unpick here about how editors think writers work, and whether we open up a fresh pine-smelling blank documents when we see a submission call we like, or reach into the drawer for a years-old yet-to-be-sold story that fits or can be made to fit. And, to be honest, I have already unpicked it.

The point of this post is our disapprobation of AI as content creator.

You'd think, as a humble creative, I'd be right behind this. Particularly as I don't have the first idea of how to go about it, nor do I particularly wish to try. My heart sinks in a workplace context when somebody says, 'can we just AI it?' regarding some minor copywriting task that a few years ago would have been a warm-up stretch for somebody with an above-average vocabulary. (And warm-up stretches are needed if you're going to go on to write more important copy. As is coffee.)

But, as a consumer too, what matters, surely, is what's produced, not how it was produced?

Consider this. Erdős Problem 1196 was recently solved by AI. Now, you won't need me to explain to you, typical reader of this blog, that Erdős Problem #1196 is a famous mathematical conjecture originally posed in 1968 by Paul Erdős, András Sárközy, and Endre Szemerédi, which focuses on the asymptotic behaviour of primitive sets of numbers. It's one of a list of conjectures the prolifc Erdős left behind when he died. As was pointed out on X, Fields Medal-level minds had been working on this for years. This was not an attention-starved conundrum. Yet, if you videoed GPT-5.4's entire performance solving it from start to finish (probably as engaging Warhol's Empire) it would barely qualify as a feature.

The key takeaway here is that the world of mathematics celebrated this development, likening AI's ability to find a completely novel way to approach the problem as akin to spotting a brand new, never before considered chess opening.

Now, I recognise the argument - that's all mere numbers and numbers are way, way easier than words. There are only ten digits, and there are twenty six letters, and that's before you consider colons and semi-colons and interrobangs and all the rest of it. Stands to reason.

But does it? Human creativity, however complex, is a process. And AI can do processes really well. The sacred cow that creative thought is one step too far for AI looks more and more like a baseless, optimistic - nay, desperate - article of faith day by day.

I think one day soon - very, very soon - AI will be able to write anything a human can. As good as. As funny as. As perceptive as. As poignant as. As weird as. As anything as.

So, it's hardly surprising both those who can see the writing on the wall have circled the protectionist waggons. I listened to an interview with Moana director Thomas Kali celebrating the near-3000 people who worked on the film, many of whom could probably have been replaced with software (NB: I'm not saying as successfully... but give it a year or two).

The whole thing puts me in mind of the early nineteenth-century Luddites, who resisted the automation of the weaving industry which would eventually result in cheaper cloth requiring far fewer people. To save you checking, the Luddites lost.

Automation affected pretty much every part of every economy, not least agriculture, which has innovated for above twenty-five centuries. In the past, most people worked in agriculture; in today’s rich countries, only a small share do. In the UK, almost 80% of adult males worked in agriculture in 1380. By 1600, it was about two-thirds. Two-fifths by 1700. Pre-First World War, a shade over ten percent of workers in England and Wales remained in agriculture. Now less than 300,000 remain in the sector out of an adult male population of around 30 million. From four in five to one in a hundred. A relentless reduction.

The point is that the economy exists for the benefit of the customer. The customer doesn't exist for the benefit of the economy. We have cheap bread because the customer won at the expense of the reapers and the threshers. Today's argument has moved on from bread to circuses - and it feels different because there's something distinctly human about the creative industries - but, at it's heart, it's the same. And, be assured, the customer will win.

And this is what our entertainment industry may look like in, say, ten years: movies and TV shows as good as the mainstream is now, with wholly fresh digital actors, not digitised versions of humans, indistinguishable from the vast majority of what's on the vast majority of our channels. And the audience will be happy.

Yes, there'll be room for the quirky and human, but only in the same way I can pay £4 for real handmade sourdough loaf or less than £1 to 'enjoy' the results of the Chorleywood Bread Process. The publishers I pitch to can happily remain in that space, pushing back on the rise of the machines, because they're akin to my excellent little local baker. Not a threat to Grupo Bimbo.

But, as for the mainstream... We can pretend we can choose, but it's akin to choosing to swim upstream. Possible, but exhausting and contrary to every economic instinct that has underpinned our development as a species. It would mean taking a decision as a society that we want (and will pay for!) inefficient systems that provide purpose and meaning to the twenty-first reapers and threshers.

I wish I could be optimistic. I can't see it happening. The consumer is king, and when the AI-produced content matches human-produced content, he'll vote with his subscription and remote control. Enjoy these (creative) end times. The eLuddites will lose. We voted cheap bread before. And we'll vote cheap circuses now.

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).