On a cusp of history.

My mother was born 110 years ago in central California.  As a child, her family drove by horse and buggy to their neighbor’s ranch for a town picnic. The excitement of the day: watching the first barnstormer to come to the area in his marvelous flying machine.

Half a century later, she sat glued to the “telly” watching Neil Armstrong take the first step on the moon.

So many changes she saw in that one lifetime. And she adapted to them all—except one.

My mother refused to ever use a microwave.

As for me, I grew up collecting newspaper clippings of not only that first step on the moon, but of every Gemini and Apollo mission. And in high school calculus classes, I was one of four students to spend half an hour a day learning to program on the school’s new terminal connected by telephone to one of the first time-share IBM computer bays in Houston Texas. That, kids, was in BASIC, all 1, 0,11’s, and wow, it plotted a red, black, or blue hyperbolic paraboloid diagram.

Twenty some years later, my family brought a personal computer into our home! And while our kids learned readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmatic taught to the tune of computer click and learned to program their own chess games, I sat up happily all nights long rewriting my novels on my new glorified typewriter. We were living in that Star Trek future I grew up dreaming about.

Or so I thought. Somewhere in the beginning years of the 21st century, I looked around me, and realized the computer age, the information age, whatever historians will end up calling it, had passed me by. I’d become a dinosaur still stuck in the 20th century at the beginning of its cusp. Unlike my kids, who thankfully crested its wave and are still creating the future. 

The world around me can be bewildering at times—unlike my mother, I couldn’t adapt quickly enough to every new invention. PC’s yes, email, yes, my glorified typewriter, yes, iphones, ipads, Dick Tracy watches, tricorder-like beepers, Google glasses my son was programming—wait! What?? To this day, I’ve never tried looking through one of those, nor through any more modern AR/VR headset. Nor is my right thumbnail replaced by the super new computer NailTM phone. (Just kidding on that one—I hope!)

Fast forward to November 2022, and, blink!, the world of writing entered its own new age. It’s happened to storytellers before, the word ‘novel’ was invented to describe a new way to tell a story. Over the centuries, we’ve adapted to that. At the cusp of our new future, can we as readers and writers of NewMyths adapt again?

I’ve been told one thing, AI programmers are waiting and watching for US to shape how we use the new writing programs. What it is we need the new technology to do to become just another tool in our toolbox? We can fear it, turn away from it, close our eyes to it, and become our own dinosaurs left behind. Or we can learn to create the future of writing with it.

I know I’ll be a dinosaur. I’m not even curious to try using it to write a story. Not that I worry that I’ll plagiarize someone else’s idea, the best genre writers are already building off of each other’s stories, their stories are “holding a conversation with each other” as one panel at World Fantasy Con years ago described it. No, while I may someday use a writing program, it won’t be to originate a story idea or to write it, it would be at most to help edit a passage I’ve written. I’m not alone—look at our contributor pages to see how our writers answer the question “Why do you write?” Not to tell a story for fame or fortune, but because of a passion, a need inside to CREATE. Perhaps that’s what we fear we’ll lose by accepting an AI writing program.

It’s up to us. Those of us who can crest the wave to the future and shape the AI writing programs to make them useful to us. While a few of our beloved contributors have withdrawn their stories from our consideration because of our new policy to accept (in a separated category) AI-assisted work, one contributor wrote that he is looking forward to how NewMyths’s embrace of AI will help shape the debate. We're ... cautiously ... looking forward, too.

And the first thing I see ... out of the four hundred submissions I've read so far in the first ten days of our new reading period, only ONE writer used an AI program to help write her poem. Not the flood we were expecting (fearing?) yet.

And dear readers, fellow writers and creators, rest assured. This issue of great and imaginative stories and poems are completely human-written—all accepted before last winter and the advent of the AI-writing program debate. Enjoy!

Susan Shell Winston, editor

Background Image by captainvector: 

FICTION

FLASH FICTION

POETRY

NONFICTION