Examinations of Science Ficton with a Mixture of Serious Analysis with Comedy

Tonight’s full-length feature comes from AJ Van Belle, a gruesome mystery and the truth about goblins. Many thanks to the author.

**The latest update to _Calibre_ , the popular open-source ebook manager, features an AI-powered writing game. ** Calibre v9.15’s _“Create Your Own Adventure”_ mode, per the release notes, lets you build a fictional world and hand control of it to an AI who will manage it in real time based on your responses. A bit like old text-based RPGs, I guess. The changelog notes, with obvious understatement, that the feature is _“a little different”_ from Calibre’s usual fare, adding it began as a way for developers to test the tool’s AI backend before developing into “something fun to use”. Setting up your AI world in Calibre v9.15 Like all AI features in Calibre, it’s completely optional as it relies on you use adding an API key for a compatible LLM. To try it, go to _Preferences > Toolbars_ and add the “Create your own Adventure” button to a toolbar. Click this to open a setup wizard. This isn’t the first puzzling AI feature the Calibre has gained. Last month it added hooks to generate ebook covers using AI prompts and preset styles (a noir _Wuthering Heights_ ; a pulp sci-fi Barbara Cartland novel, and so on). Calibre users are, largely, people who like reading books – most with a long backlog of titles they’re not getting through1. Folks who like using LLMs to generate fiction likely have no need for an ebook manager, and vice versa. I do wonder if Calibre ought to focus on adding AI features that help, rather than distract: letting users sort ebooks, fix metadata or generate “playlists” of what read next based on a users’ library and tastes. Generating slop covers, summarising books and, now, generating fiction feels2 at odds with its role. ### Other changes in Calibre 9.15 This update also ships with improvements that don’t cause a collective head scratch. The _Highlights_ panel in the ebook viewer lets you select multiple highlights and right-click them to change the style, and if a highlight has notes, you can see that note in a hover tooltip when you mouse over it (this behaviour can be disabled). More customisations are present. A button can be added to the sidebar to change between saved window sizes, and in the cover grid you can now choose which corner of book emblems appear via _Preferences > Look & Feel > Cover grid > Layout_. Plenty of bugs were fixed, including issues with Read Aloud stopping at large images, a spellcheck quirk that overlooked words with a single apostrophe and _Calibre_ not starting for users in Alberta Canada after its recent timezone change. ## Where to get Calibre _Calibre_ is free, open-source software for Windows, macOS and Linux. Download Calibre from the official website – on Linux, Calibre is installed and updated via a command-line script that will download a binary, unpack it to a system folder and create the various `.desktop` shortcuts needed to find and open it in app menus, etc. Alternatively, you can get _Calibre_ on Flathub, although it is an unverified build. 1. LLMs be like _“hey, I got through my backlog of 2000 classic novels cribbed from the Gutenberg project, wbu?”._ ↩︎ 2. Maybe that’s me being all “old man shouts at clouds” – I don’t buy books written after 2023. ↩︎

Sujit Das: A Boy on the Way Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar …