Cover of O.Welles 19/8.4 — a novel by Vincent Murphy
A novel · written 2017

O.Welles 19/8.4

By Vincent Murphy

In the red desert, a Runabout carries a watch she cannot read and a bullet she may have to use.

Written in 2017, the year the author argued — six months before "Attention Is All You Need" — that the dam was about to break. A novel in which AGI is ambient infrastructure, not subject matter. Orwell's coordinates, inverted: what does it look like when humanity gets its act together instead of falling into the nightmare?

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The premise

A dystopia
and the society
on the other side of it.

Most novels about AI are dystopias. O.Welles 19/8.4 is structurally something rarer: it begins in the dystopia and brings the protagonist out of it — into the working society on the other side of the Great Barrier of Grief.

The dystopia, Quastralia, is a regime built on the ideology of "One True Free": brutal, fixed, scarce, sacred. The author's stand-in for everything the print era's worst political instincts produced. The protagonist is a Runabout — a child runner carrying physical messages across the desert because every other form of communication has been "jammed, hacked, hijacked or cracked wide open."

What lies on the other side of the Barrier is the Interdependent Stake — a society in which AGI has been so deeply assimilated that nobody discusses it, in the way nobody now discusses moveable type. The Stake's defining civic institution is Mootball, a sport in which physical and intellectual contest happen simultaneously, governed by the fictional International Mootball Authority. The Laws of Mootball function as appendix to the book, in the tradition of Orwell's Principles of Newspeak.

A working society does not eliminate contest. It civilises it.

Provenance

Written before
the field caught up.

Written
January 2017
Published transformer paper
June 2017
"Attention Is All You Need"
Lead time
−6 months

The article that became the novel — Facing the Imminent Problem of AI & Robots — was written in January 2017, six months before the publication of "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that gave the world the transformer architecture. The argument came out of years of monitoring the field and reasoning forward; the novel followed shortly after, an attempt to imagine the society on the other side of the imminent shift.

The book has been held back until now because the audience the world has just spent eight years assembling is, finally, ready to read it. (Or, as a character in the novel puts it more memorably: like Eudi reading Joyce.)

Lineage

A small and difficult tradition:
working societies, depicted seriously.

Most speculative fiction goes negative because conflict is easier to dramatise than its absence. Imagining a society that worked — and finding the conflict, drama, and stakes within it — has been attempted only rarely:

Iain M. Banks
The Culture novels. Post-scarcity society as ongoing dramatic substrate.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Anarres in The Dispossessed. The working anarchist society and its real costs.
Philip K. Dick (mid-period)
The functional-but-strange. Society that works, but on its own unsettling terms.
George Orwell (inverted)
1984's coordinates and structure, but flipped. The appendix-as-thesis device explicitly borrowed from Principles of Newspeak.

The title's substitution — Welles for Orwell — is the first of the novel's moves. Orson Welles appears in the book as a character; the Snooper projectile that the Humilitary fire across the Great Barrier carries the designation 19/8.4. The reader, in other words, is being snooped.

Press · Rights · Reviews

For agents, editors, journalists, and podcast bookers.

A hard-copy print run is in production; Kindle release is imminent. Review copies, manuscript excerpts, and interview availability on request.

vincent@vincentmurphy.co.uk

For broader context on the author's frameworks (Cognology, Ludicity, the Printocene, the Three S Shift) and how they relate to the novel's world-building, see the Lexicon.