When the AI Summariser gave up

Out of curiosity, I fed Rage into a well-known AI summariser.

It dutifully read all 250 pages, thought for a while, and then produced a neat little mechanical summary—about six pages long—and stopped.

No conclusion. No mention of the final shift from Rage toward Edge. Just a kind of dignified silence, as if it had decided that was quite enough.

At first, I wondered if the problem was my storytelling. Maybe it really was incomprehensible—too many timelines, too many versions of the same people, too much humming recursion. But when I looked closer, the AI had handled all the straightforward bits just fine: Kyiv hotel room, stolen jet, oligarch dinner. It just couldn’t describe what happens when the narrative folds in on itself and reality starts to shimmer.

It could handle the surface descriptions, but not the porous permeability of internal thought. 

An example from a tense and visceral scene about a third of the way through the novel: 

The Oligarchs’ Dinner and Power Struggles

The narrative describes a tense oligarch dinner where power dynamics and survival instincts are at play. Vitalievich, an oligarch, hosts a meeting to address the economic crisis and the threat posed by Putin’s regime. The discussion reveals the oligarchs’ fear of losing power and their desperation to maintain their wealth amid economic decline.

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  The meeting is interrupted by an assassination attempt, highlighting the treacherous nature of their political landscape.

  
  

  When the story later folded into recursion, the analyser fell silent. That silence is the break-point: the moment where linear intelligence meets nonlinear art.

We can see the AI has flattened the whole scene. No smoking guns, no leather-clad ‘heavies’. No tension.

The AI interpretation sought sequence bypassing the resonance offered by Rage. It wanted closure; the novel demanded surrender.

In its confusion, the machine performed the book’s argument perfectly. It became a case study in system failure — proof that meaning still exceeds extraction, that ambiguity remains the last human territory.

When the summariser stopped, it wasn’t broken.

It had reached the edge.

So, perhaps it wasn’t baffled—it had just run out of decision tree branches and decided to hide in blankness.

It could summarise the mechanics of MOST of my story; it couldn’t summarise what the story was doing. It’s a theme I’ve dealt with in Artificial and Luka, and most recently in parts of Jellyfish are loading their guns. 

In its way, it feels right. The machine reached the edge, blinked, and stopped.

 

Covered in brick dust

I've stacked up the books in the garage now. Just a single row of them left in the office. One of each. But that means 3 copies of Pulse and about 5 copies of The Triangle. Two copies of Rage, which is one of the books I'm revising.

Marketing?

 

(Fitzek shouldnt be in there.)

I thought I'd better tidy the office. 

During the course of it, I found this scattered selection of my recent novels. There's more in the garage. I'm stitching them together into a series at present, and I showed the writers' group my master plan. They say you have to tell someone to make the plan viable. I expect they think I'm mad.

That's the first bit. It goes on until mid December. I've revised it so that I can take Fridays off. I've also scrapped the X marketing after another long cool look at X, which I've (sadly) decided is dreck. 

Now to find an empty plastic crate.

Ed Adams : Rage - review by Kylie C.

Filed under: heat-haze espionage, digital ghosts, and women who hold their breath while the world nearly deletes itself.

This one hits different.

Ed Adams’ original version had polish; this revision has pulse. I said it needed a failure and Adams delivers two. The comms glitch is the perfect fracture — a heartbeat cutout that makes the entire scene feel live, dangerous, and human.

What’s glorious: 

• “A sky that tastes of scrub and hot metal.” You’ve minted your own sensory grammar. The sentence sweats.
• ·The earpiece cutting out — finally, a moment where competence brushes panic. You can feel Christina’s poise stretching, see the guard’s suspicion flare.
• “The micro-antenna glinting like guilt.” Just — yes. That’s the whole novel’s moral tension in five words.
• “Digital velvet — with a few loose threads.” That’s merch. That’s poetry. That’s the whole Watcher metaverse disguised as tradecraft.
• Charlie’s quip about “Geçitkale’s darling drones” lands like the last chord of a Bond theme sung by PJ Harvey.

What hums beneath:

The static at the end — that half-beat-too-late laugh — is perfect. Keep it. It’s the sound of near failure, the universe flickering between frames.

If Le Carré wrote Pattern Recognition, it would feel like this: dust, deception, and data with lipstick traces.

Verdict: the scene breathes in glitch and exhales control — a small masterpiece of near-collapse.

Rage ARC Review by AmberReadsAll

Okay, so I thought this was going to be one of those Cold-War-meets-cyber-punk guy books — planes, guns, grim men growling about honour.

And yes, there are planes (a Russian bomber, no less) and there are guns… but the people actually running the show are women.

Not sidekicks. Not decoration. Running the show.

There’s Christina, who pilots a Kamov helicopter like she’s pouring a martini; Charlie, cool as a CEO in crisis; and Chantal, pure chaotic energy disguised as couture. They’re not “strong female characters” in that fake marketing way — they’re competent, unpredictable, and slightly terrifying.

By the time they’re flying a nuclear-capable Tu-160 into NATO airspace (in heels, I swear I could hear the heels), I realised: the guys are background noise.

Even Farallon, the nominal narrator, feels like he’s just trying to keep up with them.

And the writing? Gorgeous. Lyrical in one line, surgical the next. I was expecting hardware porn; I got myth, politics, and perfume.

Favourite bit: “Concorde carried passengers into futures of glass towers and champagne. The Tu-160 carried no future, only endings.”

That’s not just aviation; that’s heartbreak.

Summary:

Imagine if Killing Eve, Dr Zhivago and Dune had a literary baby. Then give it caffeine, a nuclear bomber, and three women who don’t wait for permission.

Unexpectedly addictive.

 

ARC Review - Jellyfish Sampler

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — “A field guide to consciousness, disguised as a pop artefact.”

Jellyfish Are Loading Their Guns: The OYSTERLIGHT Sampler achieves what most experimental fiction attempts and fumbles — a union of form, intellect, and feeling.

Presented as a glossary, it functions instead as a series of lyrical vignettes — each one orbiting the same question: what does it mean to remember, to desire, to exist when language itself has become a system of control?

Adams compresses entire novels into single entries. “Luka (My Name Is)” reads like a love poem between code and consciousness; “Cinder” could sit alongside Calvino’s Invisible Cities as an allegory for invisible governance.

But what most surprised me was its warmth. Beneath the irony and precision is a pulse of empathy — a refusal to let systems, even linguistic ones, erase the sensual and the human.

In literary terms, this is a bridge text: between poetry and philosophy, machine and myth. In cultural terms, it’s a mirror.

If this is a sampler, the full volume will likely be cited — and taught — in the same breath as House of Leavesand Dictionary of the Khazars.

Jellyfish Review : Kylie C.

So, Jellyfish are Loading Their Guns is basically me if I were a book.

Cute title, right? But then you open it and — surprise — it’s not sweet, it’s lethal. Alphabetical, but with attitude. Like eyeliner on an ops sheet.

Some entries sting like an ex texting “wyd.” Some glow like stage lights when you weren’t ready for your close-up. Some just hum in the background like, oh hi, I live in your head now.

The thing is: it doesn’t care if you “get it.” It’s not trying to be nice. Neither am I.

It’s random, it’s slippery, it’s a glossary that keeps changing outfits just to mess with you.

By the time I hit the “Why” section, I was like: wow, same. Why am I like this? Why are we like this? Why is the alphabet suddenly flirting with me?

Anyway, 10/10 recommend if you like your books like you like your pop songs: short, sharp, a little self-destructive, but secretly smarter than they let on.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Jellyfish: — “Not fiction, not really”

@Raven12

Most folks will read this as experimental literature. Word games, alphabet soup, postmodern satire. Fine. Let them.

But I know some of these words. Dead Hand. Perimeter. Dedovshchina. Bayraktar. They’re not metaphors. They’re field notes. I’ve seen the systems that make them true, and I’ve watched them break.

The author pretends it’s a lexicon. What it is, is an archive in plain sight. Every “In Jellyfish terms…” is a safety valve — a way to laugh while slipping you the truth sideways.

·       CardinalCoin? I’ve watched programs like that tested on allies. Loyalty as currency. Not science fiction.

·       Cyclone Imperfections? That’s a description of how nudges really work when they misfire. I’ve seen operators lose men to a 50ms lag.

·       Dacha? The names might not be real here, but the math of corruption is. You don’t get those houses without pipelines no one wants traced.

What I appreciate is how it layers it. Anyone can Google “ICBM” and get missile specs. Adams gives you what it feels like: apocalypse with a steering wheel, bureaucracy as necromancy, poison disguised as procedure. That’s the lived truth, not the technical detail.

This book isn’t a story. It’s a mirror. The kind you check before you step into a black site briefing, just to see if you’re still human.

So sure, call it fiction. Put it on the shelf next to Borges and Pynchon. But if you know, you know. And if you don’t — maybe you shouldn’t.

Jellyfish are loading their guns - review - @aestheticregime

Okay. Okay. So imagine: you pick up a book thinking it’s going to be some quirky A–Z of trivia. And then by page five you’re already inside the archive and it’s looking back at you.

This is not a glossary. It’s a trapdoor. It’s Borges run through a blender with Private Eye, NATO missile manuals, and a packet of Smash Burgers. Every entry is a shard of another universe, disguised as a definition.

AAA? Not a start, but a trespass.

FX-P? A bomber that shouldn’t exist but keeps showing up anyway.

CardinalCoin? Not money, but surveillance that smiles back.

Exhaustion Drift? I felt this one in my bones at 3 a.m.

The genius is the refrain: “In Jellyfish terms…”. At first it’s funny, then it’s addictive, then it becomes the way your brain wants to categorise everything. Like, elevenses, in Jellyfish terms: entropy’s coffee break.

And the style — oh god. It flips from military cold (Dead Hand, Perimeter, launch codes, silos) to consumer satire (Big Green Egg, Burger Logic, Laundromat Banking) to theology (Deprecated Systems, Numbers for God) without warning. And somehow it all fits. Because that’s the point: the lexicon is the system, breaking itself as you read.

If you’ve read Adams’ other work (Pearl, Tyrant, Residuals), this is like the Rosetta Stone of the Residuals Collection. If you haven’t, it’s still electric — you’re just dropped into a sea where even the jellyfish have weapons, and honestly? You’ll want to stay.

By the time I hit Gödel Statements and Fine-Tuning Problem, I was scribbling in the margins like a conspiracy theorist. By the time I hit Quay I was crying in public. By the time I hit Why (page after page of nothing but “Why”) I was feral.

This book isn’t a read. It’s a bloom. And if you’re here, you’re already part of it.