Month: November 2025

Children of the Mind — Read Report

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Children of the Mind is billed as the final book in the “Ender Quartet.” In my opinion, that quartet is really Ender’s Game standing on its own, and sequel trilogy that is in many ways tonally different and mostly disconnected in plot.

The trilogy of Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind centers on the story of the planet Lusitania, thousands of years after Ender’s defeat of the buggers. The ticking clock of the series is the war fleet sent to destroy Lusitania. It has been delayed by the computer intelligence Jane, but now Starways Congress is aware of her presence in their computer systems, and has a plan to reset their communications network across the hundred worlds. This will not only prevent her from meddling, but effectively kill her as she’s reduced from millions of computer systems to only a handful.

The destruction of Lusitania would do more than kill the thousands of human colonists, because the planet is also home to the only other intelligent species known to humanity: the pig-like Pequeninos, whose life-cycle was heavily modified by an extra-terrestrial virus—the Descolada—and includes a worm-like larval stage and an eventual transformation into something like a psychic tree.

Ender has also brought the last of the Bugger hive-queens to Lusitania, where it is busy building enough industry to build starships and send out new queen larva to distant planets, ensuring the continuation of the species.

A final additional subplot is introduced, as if there weren’t enough. The dangerous Descolada virus has been neutralized on Lusitania, replaced with a harmless version that fills the needs of Pequenino physiology without the danger of infecting and modifying the genomes of other species. But it has become apparent that the virus is not natural. It was created, and the species that could and would send such a dangerous weapon into the universe is potentially the greatest threat humans, Pequeninos, and Buggers have ever seen.

Ender, once the titular character, has now been almost entirely sidelined in the story. As a reader, his perspective is barely present in the book, and he spends a good chunk of it effectively comatose. By the end, it’s apparent that the book is a send-off for him. His presence almost feels like an afterthought. Instead, the book focuses on Miro (his adopted son and Jane’s new favorite human), Si Wang-mu (genius emigrant from the planet of Path) and young Val and Peter, ghosts from Ender’s childhood that he made physically manifest on his brief trip outside the universe in Xenocide.

Tonal Shift

Analyzing the series as a writer, it’s interesting to see the transformation of Card’s style in the post-Ender’s Game trilogy. Ender’s Game was a relatively near-future hard SF story that focused on a single brilliant boy’s journey through military school, and the horrifying extremes the wartime government was willing to go to in order to defeat an existential threat to humanity. While there is a B-plot for Peter and Valentine, most of the story stays tight on Ender’s perspective.

The subsequent trilogy is much more scattered, and while it touches on plenty of interesting ideas, I think this lack of focus is somewhat to its detriment. The series becomes decidedly softer sci-fi, culminating in a deus ex machina mode of faster-than-light travel that also allows near-magical creation of a bespoke super-virus and several entirely new people.

My daughter and I both came to the same comparison independently—the Golden Compass series had the same seemingly tight beginning before spiraling off into odd and confusing tangents. Both feel like completely different series at the beginning and the end.

A fair amount of Ender’s Game is dedicated to his own internal angst as he undergoes indignities and abuses at the hands of the adults in positions of authority over him. The subsequent books include even more angst, spread across a large cast of characters. Long internal monologues are par for the course, and I would be hard-pressed to identify any character experiencing any kind of happiness before the final two or three chapters.

Where Ender’s frustration and eventual desperation felt appropriate to his situation, I couldn’t help but feel that this modus operandi became oppressive with so many more characters, and continuing for three books. It was unrelenting and a little exhausting.

A side-effect of this feeling was that the problems posed to the characters became so big and so multitudinous that their inevitable resolutions at the end of the series felt too trite and easy in comparison. It’s a tough balancing act to set up huge roadblocks for the characters and then resolve them in a way that feels earned.

Welcome to Ethnic Planet

I am keenly aware that I’m reading this series 30 years after its original publication. One of the strangest things about these books is the way Card has built his universe. His characters and their personalities run up against each other in a variety of interesting and well-thought-out ways, but his settings feel like cardboard cutouts in comparison.

The planet of Lusitania is the most fleshed-out setting in the series, but that’s a little deceptive because it has been engineered for simplicity. The Descolada has ravaged the ecosystem, and only a dozen species have managed to adapt. There is a single human colony city, and it is Portugese Catholic through-and-through.

The common sci-fi trope would be to construct “Star Wars” planets with a single distinguishing feature, usually an environmental biome. The ice planet. The forest planet. The desert planet. The lava planet.

Strangely, Card has managed to at least partly eschew this (though Lusitania is a uniform mix of forest and plain and Trondheim is icy). However, he has very plainly replaced these tropes with a different sequence: planets that are each a uniform human monoculture. Even more strange, in my opinion, is how these caricatures hew to a myopic 1990s American perspective. Say what you want about some of the performative multiculturalism in the still-not-very-broad-minded modern publishing industry, but I am honestly a little surprised that Card’s blatant stereotyping made it into a series that was not only mainstream, but award-worthy in its day.

Speaker for the Dead introduced Trondheim, the stoic Scandinavian planet. Xenocide introduced uniformly Chinese planet of Path, dominated by a kind of luddite, vaguely Taoist folk religion. Children of the Mind adds two more:  Divine Wind and Pacifica. Divine Wind is the Japanese planet, industrious and technologically innovative much as the US saw Japan in the 70s and 80s. Pacifica is the Samoan planet, and everyone that Peter and Wang-mu encounter there seems to be built like a linebacker, living a simple tropical life, and deeply invested in ancient, polytheistic religion.

There is an argument to be made that the book explicitly says that these planets are more diverse, and there is more to them than regions depicted in the main plot. However, I think this is a weak argument. It’s textbook telling instead of showing, and it seems to admit that the cultural caricatures, which are all we’re actually shown, are shallow and problematic.

Besides, the problem is not the lack of wokeness, it’s the abject unbelievability of a universe where each planet is almost entirely populated by uniform groups of people defined by a handful of simple traits that apparently haven’t changed over thousands of years. This is as absurd as the idea of a modern Italy that has adapted to our current world, technology, and politics while remaining culturally almost identical to the early Roman empire.

Even weirder, the term “western” is explicitly used, which is nonsensical in a far-future multi-planetary society. Of course, the core power systems of the Starways Congress and the military seem to be fully controlled by these “western” cultures, because who could possibly envision a universe where the US and Europe aren’t dominant?

The Dangers of Rereading

I have to admit, part of me wishes I hadn’t revisited these books. They didn’t quite live up to my fuzzy teenage memories of them. Those memories told me that Ender’s Game was the best of the set, and I continue to feel that way. But the sequel trilogy might have been better served by being further divorced from that book and getting a little more breathing room to explore other ideas.

In the end, I found the “Ender Quartet” to be an interesting series, but ultimately flawed enough that I had a tough time enjoying all the good bits without being reminded of the things that annoyed me. My current views are certainly affected by my age, my experiences, and the many fantastic books I’ve read in the interceding decades.

On the other hand, I might have reason to worry if I felt the same way about these books today as I did in my teens. For writers, rereading our old favorites can be a fun and useful exercise, but it’s also a dangerous one. You may find that those books were more enjoyable through the lens of nostalgic memory than they are in the cold light of a fresh read.

AI Art is Inverted Patronage

I happen to know a painter. Imagine for a moment, that I just moved into a new house, and I decide that I want new art to decorate the place. I tell my artist friend that I’ll pay her to create twenty paintings to my specifications.

Now I’m edgy, and I’ve already painted the walls black, so I decide what I really want is a bunch of paintings that look like H. R. Geiger’s work, specifically the movie Alien. I tell my artist friend that I want a shadowy techno-biological spaceship bridge for the entryway, and a carapaced, eyeless monstrosity for the living room, and for the bedroom, three damp corridors that look like the inside of an esophagus.

She rolls her eyes, but agrees to the terms. She paints the paintings and presents them to me. I like them, mostly, but I want a few changes. She makes a few modifications, I pay her the agreed-upon sum, and the deal is complete.

Here’s the question: am I an artist? I clearly have an artistic vision for my house—a vision so singular and intense that nobody seems to want to come over anymore. But should I be credited in the act of creation?

The Inversion

We already have a term for arrangements like this. It’s been around for quite some time. This kind of arrangement is artistic patronage. I pay you, and you create art to my specifications.

The general concept has evolved, from nobility and the wealthy supporting individual artists, to platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon allowing fans to support their favorite artists, to the many and varied forms of modern contract-worker abuse, where artists are treated more and more like machines that turn money into art, and preferably at the highest possible rate of exchange.

The twist in our current moment is that AI has provided a new type of patronage—cheaper and faster and even more heavily mediated by Silicon Valley technology. Instead of the wealthy paying human artists, the AI companies are attempting to build an ecosystem where mostly less wealthy patrons pay LLMs, and indirectly, their wealthy investors.

Since the process of training LLMs divorces the training inputs (the work of human artists) from the outputs, it has so far been treated (from a legal perspective) as transformative of the original work, and therefore fair use. And since machines cannot be copyright holders yet, nobody owns the rights to the resulting output.

Expression and Skill

Proponents of LLM-generated art argue that gen AI is a tool like Photoshop, and prompting is simply a new artistic skill. They argue it can be equally expressive.

As an extreme comparison, let’s look at scanning or photocopying. Photocopying generates an artistic output, a nearly exact copy of an artwork, but has little expression or skill. The only skill is identifying art that you want to copy.

AI images are more than this, certainly, but how much more? They aren’t direct copying, but the popularity of prompts “in the style of X” show that this remains a strong element. Especially since most prompters do not bother to analyze the techniques that contribute to the desired style. Most users cannot explain why the Simpsons looks like the Simpsons, or Ghibli looks like Ghibli, they just know they want a profile pic that looks “like that.”

AI art does takes creative input from the user: a description of something imagined. In this, it is similar to traditional art. While some artists, especially abstract artists, may start with a technique or a set of colors or a mood, most will start with some idea of concrete subject.

Many non-artists assume the process of creating art is all about getting that imagined thing from brain to paper with as little deviation as possible. This, I think, is simply not true. The process of generating a piece of art can be broken down into hundreds or thousands of tiny micro-expressions.

Each line and brushstroke in a painting is an atomic particle of artistic expression. Each word in a novel is a choice the artist had to make. The canvas is ten thousand interconnected empty spaces, and the artist chooses how to fill each one, accounting for the spaces around it that have already been filled.

AI proponents will say an AI prompt is constructed of many tokens, and LLM users will iterate repeatedly, tweaking their prompt. But how do brushstrokes in a painting compare to tweaking words in a prompt?

Determinism and Intentionality

LLMs are non-deterministic. With the exception of some very tightly constrained outputs, the exact same prompt to an AI will generate different outputs on each attempt. The user’s input is only partially responsible for the output. The rest is dictated by the ineffable statistical noise of AI inference. Some elements of the resulting work are inherently external to the user’s prompt.

We could argue about whether the same brushstrokes by the same artist over multiple paintings can result in identical paintings, but if they do not, then it’s due to small differences in environment, in tools, or inconsistency of skill. The artist, in the process of making ten thousand micro-expressions of their art, responds to these tiny, incremental outputs and adjusts the rest of the piece.

Differences between outputs are an expression of the artist, an interplay between the intentional and the accidental. Differences between nondeterministic AI outputs are not an expression of the user-patron. They are a mindless side-effect of AI generation. They are noise, not signal.

Art is Process, Not Product

By being directly involved in every micro-expressive decision and adapting and adjusting to the results with every output, the process of “traditional art” is a conversation between the artist and the art in progress. Even if two processes result in nearly identical pieces, the traditional process provides many more opportunities for making decisions, and adapting to the work as it’s created. These are direct expressions of skill and artistic intent.

Even if we treat generative AI as an artist’s tool, it is a blunt and wildly inaccurate instrument. It allows for relatively little input, and that input affects the output in highly variable and nondeterministic ways. Despite allowing for much faster iteration on “fully completed” pieces, there is scant mechanism for interplay between artist and art within the process of creation. It remains a black box.

In short, you don’t create a piece of art in collaboration with gen AI. You ask as best you can, then evaluate a finished output and decide if you need to ask again, trying to come up with the magical incantation that provides something approximating the desired result.

Vibe Check

Many of the most vocal advocates of prompting as artistic expression were not making art before widespread availability of LLMs. Most professional and long-practicing artists are disdainful of AI art. Yes, this is a broad generalization, and admittedly anecdotal to my own personal experience. But all I’ve seen from those in the pro-AI camp is equally anecdotal, so I figure my personal experience is as valid as someone else’s.

Why are artists not embracing AI wholesale? I believe it is because practicing artists are already used to exercising their creativity and skill constantly. They tend to recognize that prompting an AI is a fundamentally different thing from painting or drawing or writing fiction, even if painting is mediated through technological tools like touchscreens and tablets, and writing is done in a word-processor will spelling and grammar check.

Artists recognize that prompting doesn’t allow for the depth of creativity that they need and expect. They feel the way it takes away granular control and intimate feedback.

Gatekeeping

There is an argument, frequently deployed by the pro-AI crowd, that artists are gatekeeping art and resisting its democratization. A parallel argument is that AI is an artistic accessibility tool for the disabled and, weirdly, the unskilled.

This argument seems easily debunked by the many incredibly accomplished disabled artists in the world, many of whom have developed remarkable skills despite the challenges they face. Again anecdotally, it also seems like it’s rarely disabled artists actually making this argument, and much more frequently someone making it on their behalf.

There are examples of artists suffering disease or injury that made it impossible to continue creating art in the same way. Some are able to work around this. For some, using AI is an opportunity to gain some expressive ability back. But it is of a substantially different kind.

However, the frequent discussion of “lack of artistic skill” in these contexts is absurd to me. It implies that skill is inherent and not learned. It suggests that lack of effort or determination is on par with real disability, and that we should have pity on the would-be painter who hasn’t picked up a brush since grade-school and is offended that artists would dare deny them the tools to express themselves.

What these would-be artists fail to understand is that they are cheating themselves. They have not experienced the complex interplay between artist and art that is fundamental to the act of practiced creation. They believe that their AI-prompted art is giving them the same sensation, the same creative outlet, that the practiced artist gets from drawing or painting by hand. But it is only a shallow facsimile.

The artists are not trying to keep these people out of the walled garden of art. They are trying to get the prompters to understand that they are depriving themselves of a far richer experience by choosing the tool that seems more approachable.

Making Art

The sudden advent of tools that allow us to speak a few words and generate a painting is interesting and worrying and weird; embedded in complex and often problematic cultural and technological contexts. It’s that shocking sensation of science fiction suddenly become real.

Prompting AI clearly allows for some creative expression that influences the output, and that output can look quite competently rendered. But it is a fundamentally different and less expressive activity than traditional, “manual” forms of creation. It is less human. It should not be classed as the same thing as making art.

It also reveals broad cultural misconceptions about the artistic process, where only the final output is valued, and the process is not. That may sound cliché, but it is a meaningful cliché nonetheless. The process is valuable, and ignoring it is crass materialism and commodification of art; indifference to the meaning and mysticism of human creation.

Art can be sold, so corporations care about the output. They see artists and process only as a cost center. They have trained us on their viewpoint, to care only about the product (and it is purely a product to them). They call it “content,” so indifferent to the actual thing that it’s given this bland, meaningless label. The plain cardboard box of art.

I think I will have more to say on this subject, but I’ll stop here for now. I’d love to hear what other creatives think. Am I misrepresenting you? Do you see value in gen AI as a tool for artists? How much of the value of art is in the output vs. the process of creation? Let me know in the comments.

State of the Blog — November 2025

My “State of the Blog” posts are something I’ve been doing since the start of Words Deferred. Back when I was posting more frequently, I’d write these every six months. In 2024, I decided to switch to a yearly cadence—and now I dropped the ball and I’m two months late.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years Blogging: 5
  • Total Posts: ~550
  • WordPress Subscribers: 159
  • Monthly Views: 760 (avg. over last 3 months)

Noteworthy numbers in the past year include the all-time view count hitting 20,000, and highest daily views hitting 213.

The 2024 Slump

Words Deferred has never been “big,” but the stats showed steady growth from 2020-2023. During that first couple years I posted quite a lot, aided by projects like Razor Mountain and journaling through NaNoWriMo, where my fiction writing time and blogging were tightly intertwined. I was also trying a lot of different ideas, still figuring out what exactly I wanted this website to be.

In 2024, I embarked on my Year of Short Stories, where I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short stories. That was a great experience, radically increasing my comfort level with all aspects of writing and submitting work, and I also got some of my work published, which is nice.

That project set me up for one weekly post documenting my progress and submissions. My other posts were less frequent, and ultimately the blog was quieter than previous years. The Year of Short Stories was a project that took most of my writing time and energy, and since I was planning to submit the stories I was writing, I couldn’t use those as content. I also suspect that my weekly updates were less likely to draw in readers from week to week in the same way that something like Razor Mountain’s ongoing story might.

Whatever factors contributed, 2024 was the first year since the start of the blog where I saw the metrics go down—a roughly 30% drop from 2023. I generally try not to pay too much attention to the numbers (outside of these retrospective posts), but I’ll admit that a drop like that is a little disheartening. It begs the question, “have I already peaked?” It’s a lot easier to ignore the relatively low view counts when they’re at least going up every year.

2025: The Year of…Nothing in Particular?

As 2025 rolled around, I found myself once again at the crossroads where I’d finished another writing/blogging project, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. Over the years, I’ve learned that I work most effectively when I have some big project like this to focus on. I think it also makes for good bloggery when there’s a big project to talk about week after week. Documenting those writing projects helps me get through them, and hopefully provides something interesting to post. When I don’t have a long-term focus, I tend to flail around and procrastinate.

Going into this year, I was burned out on short stories. For lack of a better idea, I decided to try tackling a different project each month. What were those projects going to be? I didn’t really know.

For January, I picked an easy one: write a page per day. No problem. I’ve probably done ten NaNoWriMos, at least half of them successful, and this was a much easier version of that. I finished first drafts of two short stories, and even wrote some goofy fan-fiction for a game I was playing at the time, something I’ve never done before.

Then February hit, and I stalled out hard. I had several completed drafts sitting around, and I’d been struggling to find the motivation to revise them. I figured that would be a good goal, but I never really picked out a particular metric to hold myself to.

Then I was sick for a few days. The kids were sick for a few days. School activities started and I ended up being a mentor/coach. We had some family medical issues. Before I knew it, my plans were long-abandoned. I ended up having more than one month in 2025 where I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t writing much outside the blog either.

It’s never been hard for me to find reasons not to write—hence the name of the site—but the first half of 2025 was chock full of them. Without a big, clear, overarching project to keep me going, I dropped off the map for a while.

Second Wind

Looking back, I didn’t really get my feet under me, writing-wise, until summer. The kids finished school for the year, activities were over, and the medical issues were mostly resolved.

I spiffed up the blog layout ever so slightly, added Recommendations and Support Me pages, and took stock of my recurring post formats. Now that I’m into year five of Words Deferred, I’ve found a few formats that I enjoy writing and can keep coming back to:

The articles I most enjoy writing are still those that dig into the art and craft of writing, from brainstorming to revision to publishing trends. And while I enjoy having a big project to work on throughout the year, I found that I can lean on these recurring series to have something interesting to write about at least once a week, and keep my pen to the paper.

Oddly enough, my number of posts published in 2025 will probably work out similarly to 2024, maybe even a little less, thanks to how little I was writing through June. However, my views have been rising steadily ever since then, and I’m already getting way more eyeballs than 2024. Will I hit beat the 2023 peak? I don’t think so, but it’s looking more possible.

SEO for Dummies

Are there some sort of lessons to be learned about search engines and keywords and maximizing internet points in all this? Probably. The only reason I noticed my views were going up again was because WordPress sent me a little notice to say “Hey, we were surprised to see some people are reading what you wrote.” So I looked at the “Insights” tab on my dashboard, and that only confused me more.

The only app I automatically share posts on is Bluesky. In previous years, I used to share on TwiXter, back before the bots and assholes took over and they shut down the socialist blog-posting APIs in favor of their glorious, free-market, All-American blue checkmarks. So of course it makes sense that WordPress tells me I got about 6,000 shares each on Facebook, X, Reddit and Tumblr, where I never post anything.

I don’t know how this is possible. If you’re sharing my posts on Facebook and Tumblr, please reach out and clear this up for me.

And what exactly is a “share?” Clearly not the same as a “view.” Maybe a “glance?” But then, when people read my articles through the email subscription, that doesn’t count as a view either. Google also sends me monthly search statistics that appear to wildly overestimate just how much traffic they’re sending my way. They use the even more vague term “impressions.” I can only assume an “impression” according to Google means that my website was on page 10 of the search results when someone skimmed the AI overview.

I checked the WP and Google search insights. I seem to be coming up in roughly the same searches as I have been for years. I found out that I’m cited in the Wikipedia article for “Mystery Box.” That’s kind of fun, and apparently counted for 3 whole clicks. Who is clicking that? ChatGPT helpfully sent seven people my way. Why? Maybe they asked it why people hate LOST so much.

In conclusion, the internet is a unfathomable beast. It giveth and it taketh away. None can know its true heart, and those who claim to do so are false prophets.

What’s Next?

I’m itching for another big project. But when I say “big,” that might just mean The Year of Even More Short Stories. Whatever it is, it’ll be intermingled with the usual things, the Read Reports and Story Idea Vaults and random game and TTRPG musings, and maybe even another poem.

Let’s all just try to make it to the end of the year, and then we’ll see where 2026 takes us.

Reblog: The Anthropic Class Action Settlement — Writer Beware

As usual, Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware has some of the best coverage of the Anthropic settlement. If you haven’t been watching this lawsuit, the court determined that Anthropic’s AI training falls under fair use, but its illegal downloading of millions of books from pirating websites does not.

Anthropic apparently felt it was too risky and expensive to see the case to completion, with the real possibility of a judgement that falls close to the maximum statutory penalty of $150,000 per pirated work. That payout for even a fraction of the millions of books starts to look like the GDP of a small country. So they settled.

The settlement in this class action will likely grant a payout of roughly $3,000 per claimed work, but with a number of caveats. It only applies to works with proper copyright registration, currently estimated at around 500,000 books. The lawyers will get paid, and for books with a publisher who still holds rights, the publisher will also typically get about half.

If you think your work might be included, check the links from the article. There is an easy search function to see if your work was identified as pirated.

Writer Beware — The Anthropic Class Action Settlement

Unfortunately, many authors will be excluded due to the copyright registration requirement. Many self-published works, and even those with lazy “professional” publishers who never bothered to register their copyright cannot participate. For those who can, it will be months (and maybe longer) before any money sees the light of day.

Victoria also notes that this potentially record-breaking settlement is attracting the scavengers and parasites of the legal world.

Writer Beware — Predatory Opt Outs: The Speculators Come for the Anthropic Copyright Settlement

At least one law firm has targeted authors in the settlement class, trying to convince them to give up their right to participate in exchange for potential future lawsuits and the vague hope of a payout closer to the $150,000 maximum. Participants in the current lawsuit are already complaining that these advertisements and the website backing them amount to outright fraud.

Of course, the current settlement is just about guaranteed to pay something if you’re a qualifying author, and there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone opting out will get a better deal. This is a prime example of trading a bird in the hand for two in the bush.

That said, the current settlement terms are a lot less than many authors were hoping for. Part of the class-action structure gives legal right to any qualifying authors to opt out of the settlement if they have reason to think they can somehow get a better deal.

There are at least 50 other lawsuits pending against the big AI companies over copyright issues, and it’s quite possible that we haven’t heard the last word on the fair use issue, even if it’s not looking good so far for authors’ and publishers’ rights. Judging by the haphazard and questionable ways many of these companies have scraped the internet for training data, there may still be more big payouts yet to come.