AI | Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

The Digital Aesthete Cover Reveal!

June 19, 2023

We now have a cover for the anthology of stories about artificial minds interacting with art. The stories and the art are created by humans (the cover is drawn and designed by the spectacular K.A. Teryna!)

Typeface and the blurb below may not be finalized yet, but this is close enough to share!

The Digital Aesthete

Human Musings on the Intersection of Art and AI

Edited by Alex Shvartsman

Stories that explore the relationship between artificial intelligence and art, written by top science fiction authors from across the globe. Read the tales of robot painters, AI poets, and electronic gallery curators; dystopias where human artists must eke out an existence in societies where AI generates most of the content, and utopias where artificial minds help unlock and enhance human creativity.

Featuring fiction by authors from USA, UK, China, Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria, Madagascar, Argentina, Chile, Czech Republic, and Sri Lanka.

This book will be released on November 14, digitally distributed by UFO Publishing while the paperbacks are distributed by Arc Manor / CAEZIK SF & Fantasy.

There are several ways you can preorder this book. Our preference is that you do so via our Kickstarter campaign (which ends in just a few days) for the KAKISTOCRACY audiobook. The Digital Aesthete is available as an add-on in print and ebook formats but you can grab just that if that’s what you want.

Alternatives are to order direct from UFO Publishing here: (Ebook) / (Print)

Paperback is also available for preorder on Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and your favorite local bookstore!

Comments Off on The Digital Aesthete Cover Reveal! | Publishing | Tagged: AI, Cover reveal, K.A. Teryna, the digital aesthete | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

New publication: “How Gaia and the Guardian Saved the World” at Amazing Stories

October 16, 2016

On the heels of my Nature AI story comes my Amazing Stories AI story. and they were kind enough to create a cool illustration for it, too! (this is not an easy story to illustrate as you’ll find it when you read it!) I’m excited to be among the first authors to have original fiction appear in the resurrected Amazing Stories and happy to share this story with readers!

Read “How Gaia and the Guardian Saved the World” here.

#SFWAPro

4 Comments | Acceptances & Publications | Tagged: AI, Amazing Stories | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman

Two New Stories, Free to Read

September 14, 2016

It’s been a busy month. I traveled to Worldcon in Kansas City where I had a wonderful time, followed it up with a family vacation to Costa Rica where I also had a wonderful time, except I came back with a bad ear infection in both ears. (Bright side: the infection didn’t kick in while we were on vacation, only after.) I’ve been on two antibiotics and it’s finally clearing up enough to where I can write and work. Let me tell you, those things aren’t fun.

Meantime, two of my brand-new stories have been published! “Dante’s Unfinished Business” was released on September 1 in Galaxy’s Edge magazine. It’s free to read for two months, and available via subscription/purchase thereafter. As I enjoy experimenting with all forms and styles of humor, it occurred to me that I’ve never written a pot humor story in the style of Cheech and Chong (well, sort of.) So I decided to try my hand at it, blatantly ignoring the fact that I’ve never actually smoked any pot. Making sure my references were authentic meant getting an entirely different set of beta readers in addition to the ones I normally use. But I’m told I mostly got the references right, so I hope you’ll enjoy the tale. I also wrote it after binge-watching two seasons of Rick and Morty and I think a lot of the humor in the story was also influenced by that. Plotwise, it’s a loose retelling of Dante’s Inferno, except Dante is a 21st century pothead and instead of Virgil he is shown around hell by the ghost of Bob Marley.

The second story was just published online today, and will be in this week’s issue of the journal of Nature. “A Perfect Medium for Unrequited Love” is about artificial intelligence, love, and embedding communications “in the most interesting of media.” I wrote a more detailed “the making of” for the Nature Futures blog and you can read it here. I enjoy writing about artificial intelligence. Another story that explores its themes is forthcoming from Amazing Stories in the coming months or weeks.