Let’s talk about DAGGERMOUTH

On August 4, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s possible that you haven’t heard about this book yet, so let me set the stage here: H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is a dystopian romance that blew up as an indie title before getting a seven-figure traditional publishing deal, and it was just recently released in a pretty new physical hardcover. It has also been publicly accused of being written by AI.

(A quick side note: If you aren’t an Atlantic subscriber, you won’t be able to read the article at that link. Ironically, perhaps, there is at least one other website that has taken the entire article, stripped the author’s name off of it, and reposted it, with only an “originally published at the Atlantic” link at the bottom to indicate that they didn’t produce it. I’m not going to link to that article. You are welcome to find it, if you want.)

Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think I’d have picked this book up in the first place. I’ve read my share of romance novels/romantasies in the last couple of years but I’m growing tired of it as a genre, and what the kids call “spice” is starting to slowly slide toward being a reason not to pick up a book. But a good friend who has become The Person I Talk About Books To told me she’d read it and recommended it, and then told me about the AI controversy, which at the time I hadn’t heard about. She thought the accusation was ridiculous, having read the book, and pointed out that of course the author everyone was tossing accusations at was a young Black woman.(*)

For what it’s worth, Wolfe’s publisher, who gave her a whole lot of money, is standing behind her on this, and since AI-written text can’t be copyrighted, you’d think they’d have a significant interest in making sure she actually wrote the damn thing.

The book is on Kindle Unlimited, as it turns out. So I didn’t even have to pay for it. Fuck it, I thought, and downloaded it.

If this book was written by AI, we are all in really fucking big trouble, folks. Human-generated culture is dead if AI wrote this book.

That sounds like a strong recommendation. It’s not. Not quite. Daggermouth has a problem that for some reason seems very common to the indie-book-to-tradpub-success pipeline: Wolfe constantly either uses words that are just slightly not the right word or describes situations that sound good at first and don’t make sense upon second looks. The type of thing that sounds like nitpicking if you only provide one example, and I don’t plan to eviscerate the book at the moment, so let me nitpick: there is a bit early on where a character is drinking from a glass, and his many rings “clink” against the glass.

The glass in question is a wine glass– stemware, in other words– and if you’re holding stemware in such a fashion that your rings are clinking on it, you’re holding it wrong. At one point– hell, this might be the same conversation, I don’t remember– a character is sitting behind an executive-style desk having a conversation with a second character. He stands up and “in four long strides” (Wolfe is terribly fond of counting her characters’ strides) he walks to the other character to get all up in his space.

The problem is that this description both 1) forgets that he was sitting behind a desk and 2) puts the other character really far away from that desk. Seriously, take four “long strides” right now. Is that normal conversational distance?

The writing, in other words, in a mechanical and a craft sense, is mediocre. I’ve read a lot worse, mind you. But it’s definitely not good. And again, this is a weird indie-to-tradpub problem; I had the exact same issue with Ryan Cahill’s books, and I can think of three or four other authors I’ve had the same complaints about who I’m not going to bother to call out by name right now.(**)

The story hits its stride at about the 100-page mark and is off to the fucking races after that, and never lets up or slows down for the last 80% of the book. This is a good story, poorly written. And there’s enough genuinely good stuff in there– particularly the ending, which caught both me and my friend completely by surprise. There are bits that are ridiculous, too; the worst offense was a bit where the fated lovers of the piece surprise eight soldiers in his apartment, kill all eight of them, and then decide to stay the night in the apartment rather than, say, realize their cover is completely blown and go literally anywhere else. They don’t even clear the bodies out until the next morning.

I didn’t have any damn idea how to rate this, and had I not spent the first 100 pages debating every third word choice and mapping out locations in my head, this might have been a five-star read, because it needed to get good enough that I stopped paying attention to the flaws in the writing. The book managed to shut down the persnickety editor part of my brain, and usually, once that guy is unleashed on your book, you’re done. But I got caught up enough in the story that I finished the book basically overnight, and after that first 20% I was genuinely expecting to have to DNF or force myself through the rest of it. I put it at four and a half on Storygraph (follow me!) and four on Goodreads.

I would not have thought for a single second that this text was AI-generated had I not been told that it was controversial. And, to return to the article for a moment, I’m not convinced of their methodology, at least based on what the article tells me– there are, for example, two entire sentences that appear word-for-word in other books that they looked at, but they leave out the kind of important detail of which book came out first. Maybe the fucking AI ate the sentences for this book and spit them out for the other one? Plus, I’m sorry, if you’re comparing this book to a book from someone who “wrote” 400 books last year, and the sequel to this one isn’t coming out for another year, guess what? I know which author I think is writing AI. Hell, I know which author I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist. If this book comes out as a higher percentage chance of being AI than one of the other person’s 400 books, your methodology is crap and you should redo your study.

Is it possible? Sure. I’m not going to claim that my internal AI detector is top-tier or anything like that; in 8th grade the easiest way to see if a student cheated and had AI write a paper is to ask them to read it out loud, and as soon as they hit a word they can’t read, ask them what it means. It works every single fucking time. I generally don’t have to think about it a whole lot harder than that. But if it is? If a fucking genAI slop program wrote this book? It doesn’t have to be fucking Dostoyevsky for that to be a major fucking concern.

So, yeah. I’m pretty sure H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is not written by AI. It has issues but ultimately I enjoyed reading it. I’m in for the sequel. And I am absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to human culture if I’m wrong.

(*) I Googled “H.M. Wolfe age,” and the fucking AI assistant told me she was born on October 28, 2025, and then helpfully added “Age: 0” afterwards.

(**) In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the only indie-to-tradpub author who I haven’t had this problem with is Matt Dinniman, including his non-Dungeon Crawler Carl books.

#REVIEW: Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim

On July 31, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

In my review of Angel Down a couple of days ago, I talked about how I generally don’t like it very much when authors try to screw around with structure in novels. I was forced to eat my words with Angel Down’s unorthodox single-sentence structure, and now I’m about to review a book where a good half of it is written in second person.

Yes, second person. As in everything is “you did this” and “you did that,” like an old Choose Your Own Adventure book. And again, when I realized what I was looking at, I very nearly sighed and put the book down. And again, if I had done that, it would have been a huge mistake, as this is one of the more original science fiction books I’ve read … well, okay, since There Is No Antimemetics Division, which wasn’t even two weeks ago, but before that? It was a while.

Sublimation is more or less set in the real world, with only one real change to how the world works, but man, that one change is a doozy. Sometimes, when a person crosses a border, a person will leave a copy of themselves behind in the original country. Those people are entirely separate human beings, referred to as instances of the original person. Sometimes they adopt different names, sometimes they simply move on with their lives and keep their original names and identities. If instances physically touch each other, they recombine into one person, but keeping the memories and experiences of both people, who may theoretically have had many years to diverge from one another. Different cultures over human history have dealt with instantiation in different ways; sometimes it’s regarded as good luck, sometimes … not so much, but the book is clear that this has been with humanity forever. Odysseus comes up repeatedly; Adam and Eve left instances behind when they left Paradise, and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are referred to as instances of God.

This is, in case it’s not clear, one of those books that has Big Questions to ask, and if you are an immigrant this is going to hit you hard, and while instancing doesn’t necessarily happen based on major life decisions, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to meet a version of myself who had turned left in places in my past where I chose to turn right. And, again, this is a huge thing– different countries treat citizenship of instances differently, especially since it happens when people are crossing borders anyway. And it’s not a situation where one person is the “original” and one is the instance– they are both instances, and there is no original person. There is technology that has recently been developed that does allow instances to touch each other, and when both of them are using it there’s a 95% success rate in preventing recombination when they touch. But up until recently, this was permanent if you didn’t have a way to get back to the person you instanced from.

The main characters are all instances; one a young woman named Soyoung/Rose whose mother took her to America when she was a child and she grew up there; “Rose” is the American version, and Soyoung remained in South Korea. The other is a friend of hers, Yujin/YJ, who moved to America for college. While Soyoung’s instantiation wasn’t intentional, Yujin actually hoped to split, and plans to recombine after both the South Korean and American sides of him have gotten their educations and their careers started. Soyoung and Rose haven’t talked in years. Yujin and YJ talk nearly every day. Soyoung’s mom instanced also, so there are versions of “mom” in both countries.

The story begins when Soyoung/Rose’s grandfather in South Korea dies, and Rose returns for the funeral, seeing her instance for the first time in nearly two decades. And Soyoung, who has gotten engaged in the meantime, forcibly integrates them without Rose’s permission. Meanwhile, YJ works for the company that makes the anti-reintegration technology, and it turns out they’re about to debut a new product that can re-split a pair after they have reintegrated, back into their separate instances, with their original memories intact. Yujin and Soyoung are old friends; Rose did not know YJ.

And … well, we’re off to the races, with corporate espionage, familial betrayal, generational guilt, emotional manipulation and a cat hilariously named Mr. Crouton all in the mix.

(Right, I forgot to mention it: when the subject of a chapter is an instance, the chapter is written in second person. When Soyoung and Rose integrate, the narration shifts to third person. It’s a good example of how playing with structure can work.)

I loved this book. I love the premise, the execution was great, and Isabel J. Kim is absolutely on my list of authors I’m going to continue to keep my eyes on in the future. This was a really remarkable piece of work. If you like smart books written by smart people you absolutely want to read this one.

Now, that said: two caveats, to close this out: first, this is getting seriously mixed reviews– it’s at 3.65 on Goodreads right now, which is normally not a great sign. Usually, that means that a book isn’t great; other times it can just mean it was written by a Black person or has a gay relationship in it. Now, I can see the second-person aspect causing some people to put it down immediately– again, I almost did– so that’s going to account for some of it, but I looked through some of the reviews and didn’t immediately feel like the people who weren’t big fans of the book were stupid, so maybe if you’re on the fence look at some other reviews and see what folks had to say.

Second, I do not understand the title. The physics definition of “sublimation” is something that moves from a solid state directly to a gas, much like “melt” means to move from a solid to a liquid. That does not seem to apply here at all. The psychological definition, and I’m pulling straight from Merriam-Webster here, is “to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.” And that almost feels like it should fit, but … not really. If you’ve read this and you can explain the title, I’d love to hear it. I mean, Instance or Instantiation were both right there.

#REVIEW: There Is No Antimemetics Division, by QNTM

On July 19, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I liked this book so much, I’m willing to forgive the author for wanting me to call him QNTM. I don’t know why, but I have a weird visceral reaction to authors using their Internet handles on their books. It’s made even weirder when you remember that “Luther Siler” is a pen name. I don’t know a single thing about QNTM other than that he wrote this book (and, I guess, that he’s a he, judging from his author picture) but if he’s going to keep writing books this good I’ll call him whatever the hell he wants.

This is one of the most original books I’ve ever read. I can imagine China Miéville writing something like it, which is not to say that Miéville has written anything like it yet. I’m not sure who or what else to compare it to. This is going to be a fairly short review, first because I don’t want to indulge in any spoilers, and second because beyond describing the premise, I’m really not sure how the hell to talk about this book. So I’m going to give you the basics, and I’m already telling you you need to read this if you’ve ever enjoyed science fiction that was smarter than you were, and that is going to have to be enough.

The main character of the book is Marie Quinn, who is in charge of the Antimemetics Division of something called the Unknown Organization. Her division is responsible for tracking, categorizing and occasionally keeping captive entities and objects that have the property of erasing themselves from memory. That’s what an antimeme is; it’s something that you view or interact with or occasionally get messily killed by and the very moment you’re not interacting with it you forget it exists. Some can erase specific kinds of memories (the book is generally not funny, but one entity that feeds on the very specific memory of knowing how to ride a bike has a fe pages dedicated to it) and some have the capability of also erasing notes, videos and recordings that reference their existence as well.

So, given that, and given that the potential threat these types of entities pose to civilization should be immediately clear, let me ask you two questions:

How do you fight against these things, if you forget they exist the moment you turn away from them?
How the hell do you write a book about fighting against something like that?

This is a short book; at under 300 pages it can be read in a day easily, and somehow, despite the complexity of the premise, it’s impressively clearly written. You would think this would be a mess to read, and in a lesser author’s hands, it would be; I certainly couldn’t have written this book. I almost read it twice in a row, and there’s a very good chance I’m going to read it again before the month is up. It’s an incredible achievement, both as a story and as a piece of craft. I know I’ve been super positive in my reviews lately (and I have read some amazing books in 2026) but once again I need to tell you that you absolutely have to read this one. Go grab it, right now, before you forget.

On SKYLIGHTS, the Challenger, and my books

On July 7, 2026July 7, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.

Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.

I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.

And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.

I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.

I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.

#REVIEW: The Radiant Dark, by Alexandra Oliva

On June 18, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have reached a point where I am getting a truly absurd number of books every month through book box services of one stripe or another, and every time I think I’m going to get my shit together and cull one or two of them, I discover a book like The Radiant Dark, which was not on my radar in any way before it showed up and caught my interest via, in this case, my Aardvark box. Alexandra Oliva has written a couple of other books before this, but she’s new to me, and anything that can consistently feed me new authors that I like is going to continue to get my attention and my money.

The Radiant Dark is part alternate history, part science fiction, and part family saga; it starts in 1980, and at first I thought I had managed to pick up what feels like the third or fourth book in the last month or so featuring a struggling young mother with a baby and a useless husband. And, well, it is that, for a little while, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Very early in, President Carter announces that a signal emanating from a specific region of outer space has been conclusively proven to have intelligent alien origins, from an unknown exoplanet approximately eleven light-years away. And because of the distances involved, any message that gets sent back is going to take eleven years for the aliens to receive, and 22 years minimum for Earth to receive any sort of response. The book isn’t solely concerned with the communications, of course, but there have to be time skips to keep it from being a thousand pages long. Oliva also has a defter hand with her characters than you might think at the beginning of the book, and the relationship between Carol, her son Michael, and her daughter Rosanna (called Ro for most of the book) is the emotional center of the book. Carol’s husband quickly becomes her ex-husband, but he’s a complex character in his own right, and while it seems clear who the hero and who the goat is early on, it gets muddled up nicely in the fashion of most dysfunctional families pretty quickly. Ro in particular has a very strained relationship with her mother, and she will eventually become a mother on her own. I genuinely feel like even if they hadn’t had the first contact/science fiction side of this book, it would be well worth reading just because of the way it explores the family dynamics.

Ro turns out to be a world-class astronomer, and is one of the first people to decipher the second message the aliens send us, 22 years after the original beacon. She is snatched out of her Ph.D program by a world-renowned scientist who wants to use the knowledge the aliens have sent us to start looking for other potentially habitable planets and, possibly, other intelligent life– although the aliens make it clear that all they have been able to find so far is us. She presents it as a generational effort, something that she doesn’t plan to survive to see the fruits of. By the time the book ends in the 2030s, humanity has colonized the Moon and sent people to Mars, so obviously there’s some divergence from our own history, as you well might expect.

I was not expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did, and this is the rare book that I will recommend because I find the characters so compelling. I like good character work, of course, but it’s rarely at the forefront of my reasons for liking a book, especially one so suited to my interests as a first-contact science fiction novel. But I think it’s best to read this as a family saga with a side dish of sci-fi rather than the other way around; if you go into this solely as a sci-fi person, I think you’ll come out disappointed. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the aliens do show up eventually, but don’t read the book waiting for that reveal. That’s not the book Oliva wanted to write. Go in with your expectations calibrated appropriately, though, and you’ll end up with a read that I think stands a pretty good chance of showing up on my end of the year list. Check it out.

#REVIEW: Pragmata (PS5)

On June 9, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Ooooofffffff.

I started Pragmata a little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.

This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.

I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:

It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.

The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.

And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.

My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.