I’d say his writings were more novel, and interesting, than Rowling’s. He overused fancy words, and when you stripped away the ornament, his stories ran on xenophobia and catastrophising (“what if those weird-looking foreigners practice human sacrifice, or are really not humans but fish-monsters?”), but he could write a compellingly eerie story. (Some of them have, of course, aged worse than others.) Rowling, meanwhile, plots like a LLM trained on the past century of British children’s literature.
Meanwhile, neck-deep in AI slop and surrounded by bots, the uncanny valley of people that aren’t people with unknowable intentions may turn out to be the most resonant.
I’d say his writings were more novel, and interesting, than Rowling’s. He overused fancy words, and when you stripped away the ornament, his stories ran on xenophobia and catastrophising (“what if those weird-looking foreigners practice human sacrifice, or are really not humans but fish-monsters?”), but he could write a compellingly eerie story. (Some of them have, of course, aged worse than others.) Rowling, meanwhile, plots like a LLM trained on the past century of British children’s literature.
Meanwhile, neck-deep in AI slop and surrounded by bots, the uncanny valley of people that aren’t people with unknowable intentions may turn out to be the most resonant.