When He Calls Your Name is a stunner of a story & you should read it (or re-read it) now.

www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when...

screenshot of the ebook cover of Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless. Styled like a block print in black on cream, it depicts a silhouetted woman in military uniform standing before a car and group of 3 riders on a bed of vines, with birds all around. Red text at the top & bottom emphasize the book's title & author's last name.

Deathless by @catvalente.bsky.social
The cadence of this book, the repetition, the poetry of it had me full sickos mode like yes, yessss, tell me more about the birds & how sharply they glance & what eggs they'll make, like I was a kid lost deep in a book of folklore & firebirds again

@catvalente.bsky.social, i gotta let you know, I reread the humanity just wants a cuddle rant from Space Oddity fairly often, I don't think any piece of writing has so securely locked itself into my brain before. Absolutely love it! <3

Powerful Words.

fuck

garbagetown

the future is blue 😭

www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-past-i...

[this books is fantastic, as is everything i've read by @catvalente.bsky.social 🤩]

Radiance Radiance is a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery set in a Hollywood-and solar system-very different from our own

#DEAL ALERT! Calling all one-clickers because RADIANCE @catvalente.bsky.social is on #sale on #Kindle US for a limited time only!
amzn.to/4vBTwu5
#Radiance #ad #amazoncom

2026 Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists Congratulations to all of the Locus Awards top ten finalists! These results are from the February 1 to April 1 voting by readers on an open public ballot. The Locus Awards winners will be announced…

Ahhh! I am so so thrilled that my novelette When He Calls Your Name AND the anthology The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales from Stephen King's The Stand are Locus Award Finalists!

locusmag.com/2026/04/2026...

This book series is so absurd and has me cackling or making some other noise every couple of pages, I LOVE LOVE LOVE it!

First contact, but it's Intergalactic Eurovision

"Space Opera" and "Space Oddity" by @catvalente.bsky.social, two really really REALLY good reads <3

The use of “hallucinate” is a stroke of true evil genius in the AI world.

In ANY other context we’d just call them errors & the fail rate would be crystal clear.

Instead, “hallucinate” implies genuine sentience & the *absence* of real error.

Aw, this software isn’t shit! Boo’s just dreaming!

See, but bullshit.

If I ask ChatGPT to respond to all queries in the effaced third person without anthropomorphic language or emotional descriptors, it’ll do that.

If I told my boss I messed up because I was hallucinating, I'd be fired on the spot and be sent to a farm upstate.

Good lord, I knew it was bad, but 3%??

And for that 3% you must now pay more than Netflix monthly while being splattered with ads, porn, ads for porn, Nazis, ads for Nazi porn, every half-coagulated thought that dribbles out of Elon Musk’s barf-hole, & ads for Nazi/Musk barf porn.

I’ve been hearing it in science fiction the whole time I’ve been involved in science fiction 🤷🏻‍♀️

But it didn’t used to be! Until LLMs.

even the chat window is an intentional choice. there are other ways to interact with an LLM besides that format. but thats the only format that gives the illusion of human-like cognition

Also, it’s not GenAI.

That’s a deliberate obfuscating of the term General AI (meaning actually intelligent & self-aware) which has been used in that context alone for decades so that Generative AI can be hailed as such & then presumed by the market to be real consciousness.

Yes! The humanizing language is marketing to disguise all the problems that come with the technology. Don't buy it. We know LLMs aren't conscious and won't become conscious. We know how they work.

ChatGPT telling you blueberry has 3 Bs is not HAL refusing to open the pod bay doors for you, Dave.

They will NEVER do this.

That still implies it’s a person!

No, they’re not delusions or hallucinations, they’re errors, fuck ups, wrong answers, bad output, failure conditions.

A Lexicon of Horror.

(A Lexicon of Terror being a seminal work about authoritarian vocabulary, specifically in South America)

Roadrunner paints a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain.

Wile E Coyote, after running headlong into it: “awww that mountain’s just hallucinatin’”

I find it helpful to say that they are structurally indifferent to truth. Even when they're right it's incidental to the process

Because there isn’t ONE other. There’s several, and no one shares API to allow cross posting anymore, and it’s a pain in the ass to copy/paste everything five times to five sites.

Easier to just point to the number of (dead account) followers & tell the boss X is still all that’s needed.

Oh I think that’s happening in huge numbers.

But also the celebrities, politicians, and businesses are still there, which will always keep people.

I think this is the answer. There’s still the idea that you get seen more on X/Twitter than anywhere else, & most people’s follower counts are still highest there, while they’ve been careful about revealing actual numbers the can’t easily fudge (like displayed “views”) to maintain that idea

The use of “hallucinate” is a stroke of true evil genius in the AI world.

In ANY other context we’d just call them errors & the fail rate would be crystal clear.

Instead, “hallucinate” implies genuine sentience & the *absence* of real error.

Aw, this software isn’t shit! Boo’s just dreaming!

Good lord, I knew it was bad, but 3%??

And for that 3% you must now pay more than Netflix monthly while being splattered with ads, porn, ads for porn, Nazis, ads for Nazi porn, every half-coagulated thought that dribbles out of Elon Musk’s barf-hole, & ads for Nazi/Musk barf porn.

“I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.” [gilest.org]

MORE LIGHT! Farscape and Me and You and Everything That’s Ever Mattered In Art and Space and Time and Art That Is In Space At a Time | Catherynne M. Valente Get more from Catherynne M. Valente on Patreon

There we go...I just spent 30 min trying to remember who wrote this awesome essay about Farscape. It was @catvalente.bsky.social!

Anyone who was a kid in the '80s has residual trauma from all of the nuclear nightmares they instilled in us, and today is triggering the ever-livin' fuck out of me.