The first issue of the magazine Giant Robot I ever came across featured the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai on the cover—this was enough to stand out on a crowded newsstand in the mid-nineteen-nineties. But what caught my attention were the teasers for a random assortment of other stories, about gangs, surfing, shaved ice, orgies. A small tagline in the top right corner read “A magazine for you.” But who was I? I was a teen-ager and desperate to know. I suspected Giant Robot could help me figure it out.
The theory is simple. Countless classic works of literature have fallen out of copyright and into the public domain, granting normal people the right to reproduce, remix, and resell them. Pye, along with other talking heads like Julian Sage and Daniel Hall, says this offers a remarkable opportunity, one that will reward those who take advantage. After all, Moby-Dick and Treasure Island have the kind of brand recognition even the best marketing firms can’t replicate. Aspiring entrepreneurs, the logic goes, just need to act.
"We were surprised – we had to double check it was real," says Anna Wåhlin, professor of physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. "But we realised, it really does look like this – there are these shapes. There is a landscape of ice down there we had no idea about before," she says.
In 2022, an international team of scientists led by Wåhlin lowered an unmanned submersible underneath 350m (1,150ft) thick Antarctic ice. For 27 days, it travelled over 1,000km (621miles) back and forth under the Dotson Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, scanning the ice above it with an advanced sonar. The result was the very first map of the underside of an ice shelf – and the discovery of an otherworldly ice-scape – which Wåhlin likens to seeing the dark side of the moon for the first time.
When Hurricane Milton was approaching Florida last month, a mom in suburban Tampa went viral on TikTok for her refusal to obey evacuation orders. When talking about feeling safe staying in her home, she said: “My husband built this house commercial. It’s residential, but it was built commercial-grade.” She wielded the phrase like a crucifix.
Richard Powers is another writer whose work – omnivorous, full-bodied novels of both character and idea – you would think difficult to replicate via generative technologies, but his new novel Playground suggests the man himself is not convinced that will always be the case. Generative tools owned by one of the protagonists, the tech billionaire Todd Keane, play an important role in the plot, and while the ethics of their development and deployment are given a side-eye, the basic capabilities of the technology are sympathetically imagined. Powers builds his case by weaving Todd’s life through the last 50 years of AI research, and through a lifelong debate with his friend Rafi Young.
Many of the 26 stories in William Saroyan’s 1934 debut collection – reissued this month with an introduction by Stephen Fry – take place in Depression-era San Francisco and explore the experiences of ordinary people trying to get by. California-born, the son of Armenians who fled the genocidal Ottoman empire, Saroyan draws on his own heritage. His narrators are often struggling young writers, such as the protagonist of the title story, who lives on a diet of “bread and coffee and cigarettes” and laments the lack of “weeds in the park that could be cooked”.