But now, contemporary novelists are taking aim at some of the classical music industry’s most harmful practices. Recent novels by Brendan Slocumb, Ryka Aoki, Imogen Crimp, Jessie Tu, Deborah Levy, and Ling Ling Huang expose—and, in some cases, reimagine—some of the classical music world’s most troubling traditions, including the erasure of Black performers from music history, the abuse and harassment endemic to conservatory culture, and the physical injuries that often go unacknowledged by an industry committed to musical excellence above all else. Taken together, these new classical music novels invite readers to envision a world of high art centered not on elitism, exclusion, and exploitation, but on justice, community, and care.
The machines are coming for us, or so we’re told. Not today, but soon enough that we must seemingly reorganize civilization around their arrival. In boardrooms, lecture theatres, parliamentary hearings and breathless tech journalism, the specter of superintelligence increasingly haunts our discourse. It’s often framed as “artificial general intelligence,” or “AGI,” and sometimes as something still more expansive, but always as an artificial mind that surpasses human cognition across all domains, capable of recursive self-improvement and potentially hostile to human survival. But whatever it’s called, this coming superintelligence has colonized our collective imagination.
The scenario echoes the speculative lineage of science fiction, from Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” — a literary attempt to constrain machine agency — to later visions such as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000 or the runaway networks of William Gibson. What was once the realm of narrative thought-experiment now serves as a quasi-political forecast.
Eleven miles outside Terlingua, we see the sign for the Summit at Big Bend and turn onto the unpaved Lone Star Mine Road. Thirty-seven white domes appear on the hillside, dotting the dry brown-and-tan landscape like marshmallows in cocoa. I stare at them in wonder but with apprehension. I wanted to get out of my house, yes, but not colonize the moon. My anxiety rises as we drive through the isolated property up to our numbered dome and park the car.
“I don’t know if I can handle this,” I mutter, realizing how remote we actually are. I’d only seen this part of Texas while watching No Country for Old Men with my hands over my eyes. Anton Chigurh was fictional, right?
“You’d better start trying to handle it,” Anne says in her laconic native Texan voice. “Because Terlingua doesn’t have a Four Seasons.”