Last fall, while reporting Esquire’s “Future of Books” predictions, I asked industry insiders about trends they’d noticed in recent years. Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book. And for you, a reader interested in great fiction, the fallout from this challenging climate can limit your access to exciting new voices in fiction. Unless you diligently shop at independent bookstores where booksellers highlight different types of books, you might only ever encounter the big, splashy debuts that publishers, book clubs, social-media algorithms, and big-box retailers have determined you should see.
But if inflation is responsible for all that can be seen today, that raises the question: What, if anything, came before?
No experiment has yet been devised that can observe what happened before inflation. However, mathematicians can sketch out some possible scenarios. The strategy is to apply Einstein’s general theory of relativity — a theory that equates gravity with the curvature of space-time — as far back into time as it can go.
You could categorize Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Your Absence Is Darkness as a generational novel – or, being Icelandic, a saga. But where many novels in that genre either proceed chronologically, or weave evenly back and forth in time, few attempt what Stefánsson does here: to collapse time completely.
Schellmann’s The Algorithm is a wake-up call. The stakes could not be greater. When grappling with the question of whether rigid standardization through AI comes at too high a cost, we must carefully weigh the trade-offs. Indeed, as my own experience on the hiring committee illustrates, even non-AI attempts to standardize hiring can become so rigid that they preclude more holistic assessments and humanizing interactions—at least during the early stages of the process. Navigating the future of hiring in an AI-driven world requires figuring out how to balance practical limitations, a drive for fairness, and a commitment to valuing each candidate’s unique qualities and potential. It’s a daunting challenge, but one we must confront to create a deeply human future of work.