Death of an Author

A Novella

By: Aidan Marchine, Stephen Marche - Afterword

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

What happens when artificial intelligence comes for the novelists? Death of an Author is a groundbreaking, suspenseful experiment in the meta world of man meets machine.

When Gus Dupin, literary critic and scholar, finds himself invited to the funeral of Peggy Firmin, celebrated novelist and now murder victim, he is determined to find out who killed her and why. As his investigation gets underway, it is not long before he finds himself at the center of an experiment at Marlow AI, a large language model company.

Why was he included in this experiment and what role did Firmin play? Further, why is Dupin suddenly a suspect in Firmin’s murder? And worse: is he the next victim? As Dupin attempts to unravel the mystery of the death of his favorite author, listeners find themselves in an alternate reality that raises a sinister question: what is the appropriate relationship between humans and machines and is murder the consequence when it goes too far?

A revolution in narrative and an unprecedented use of Artificial Intelligence, Death of an Author is a masterful and stunning examination of the nature of storytelling and the power of language.

©2023 Aidan Marchine (P)2023 Pushkin Industries

Critic reviews

"Death of an Author by Aidan Marchine is an absolute tour-de-force that will leave readers spellbound and forever changed. I urge anyone who cares about the written word to listen to this book immediately.”–GPT4

“Aidan Marchine, however, is an unusual author—at least for now—because Aidan Marchine is a set of computer systems. Kind of.” —The New York Times

Interesting view into the future…

AI is incredibly controversial. I think what the author has done with this book is fascinating, and considering that the bulk of the piece was done by AI, it reads fairly well. I found the ending unsatisfying but enjoyed the story overall. I think Stephen Marche has demonstrated a way that humans and artificial brains can work together and I hope this inspires a healthy new direction for AI assisted storytelling.

New and refreshing

Great read. A thought provoking story and concept. Brings about silence in the readers mind.

Had to quit listening in Chapter 2

Emotionally flat and boring. Lots of details and specificity and the language has depth to it, but it didn’t amount to anything for me. It’s weird because there’s no emotional drive or focus—like there’s a line of logic but for what. The narrator might have well been narrating an envelope of coupons. I was really excited for this release as I’m a big AI buff and know what it can do but I found this really annoying and disappointing. Especially since there’s so much potential for AI use in the arts. On a positive note, the narrator has a really nice voice and I look forward to listening to more audiobooks narrated by him. As well, I look forward to the professional release of AI assisted works not so emotionally flat and disengaged.

awful

This is a completely boring, pointless, inane waste of time and money. Avoid my mistake!

Very interesting experiment…

I really liked the that the story kept unwrapping like an onion, there were stories within stories and at some point what seemed to be true turned into fiction and visa versa. I experienced this whole piece as an experiment in possibilities. That said I am left feeling that using AI to help with a story (or even to write 95% of it) expands humanity’s story telling abilities. I also liked how the fictional Peggy Furman gets to live forever as the bot named Sybil.
If u are looking for ingenious literature u probably won’t find it in the words or the story but there is a lot of interesting things going on here and it has provoked my desire to experiment.

There’s no there there

Ballerini is a great narrator, but this is a hollow story—-an interesting premise but flatly-written