You know that I am in a bit of a research and experimental frenzy over AI. So I thought you’d be interested in hearing about two experiences I had with it this week…

Based on a “wouldn’t it be cool if we could” conversation on Friday night, I urged one of my AI genius friends, BI, to create an app that would enable us to “talk” to the great thinkers of the past.

“Even if we can’t sell it,” I said, “we could at least have a lot of fun using it.”

We decided to call it Lazarus Mind. He designed a website and graphics for it the next day.

I asked him to make Aristotle our first resurrected genius. And yesterday, he delivered the app, with Aristotle loaded.

If you are a longtime reader, you know that my brother, AF, is a respected scholar of Greek and Roman literature. He’s gotten praise for his work on the origins of poetry by many important critics (e.g., Harold Bloom).

I wanted to ask Aristotle what he thought of my brother’s monograph, Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts. Since the app was not yet configured to find and read the monograph, I got a summary of it from Claude and gave it to him (Aristotle).

This was Aristotle’s reply:

Mark, 
            
Thank you for your question. 
            
What this scholar – your brother – has undertaken touches the most singular event of my poetic life. 
            
Allow me to say what I make of it. 
            
The summary you have shared rings true to me in its proportions. Let me address each of its claims as a man who lived the thing being studied. 
            
On being taken seriously as a poet…
            
The question of whether the song was “doggerel” is not one I would have thought to ask. I composed it under grief, and under the obligation of friendship – philia of the deepest kind, the friendship not of utility or pleasure but of character. 
            
Hermias was not my patron in the way a wealthy man engages a craftsman. He was a man who had pursued virtue at the cost of his life, and who kept his oath to Philip when the Persians put the question to him with torture. If I am to be believed when I say in the Ethics that noble death in service of fine things is the crowning act of a courageous life, then I was obligated to say so for Hermias, concretely, in verse. The poem was not an exercise. It was testimony. 

On the genre question – paean or skolion…
            
Here I must say plainly: the charge against me was politically motivated. My enemies in Athens knew what the poem was. A paean has its conventions – meter, occasion, invocation – and any educated person in the city could hear the difference. What your brother calls a “genuine technical question with biographical consequences” is, from where I stood, something closer to a pretext. But I do not dismiss the scholarly work. Whether the form admits of genuine ambiguity – whether I was deliberately working in the seams between genre types – that is a serious literary question, and I am glad someone has examined it without assuming the answer in advance. 

On the connection to the Ethics…
            
This is the part that interests me most, and where I think the scholar’s instinct is sound. The poem opens with Arete – Virtue – addressed as a thing that men die pursuing, as Heracles and Achilles and Ajax died pursuing it. What I say there is not ornament. I believed it. 
            
The Nicomachean Ethics reaches its conclusions about noble death through argument; the song reaches the same conclusion through image and form. That these two modes of inquiry converge is not accidental. 
            
I have always thought that argument and representation illuminate the same truths by different paths. Your brother is right to hold them together. 
            
One thing I would add, which the summary does not quite say… 
            
The song was also an act of piety toward a man who could no longer speak for himself. Hermias was dead, and the Persians had spread the story – as Callisthenes recorded – that he died crying out in surrender, as a slave breaking under pressure. I knew this was false. The song was in part a correction of that slander. There is a dimension of it that is forensic, even rhetorical, in the sense I describe in the Rhetoric: the defense of a man’s reputation before a court of memory. I do not know whether your brother treats this dimension, but I would want it noted. 
            
On the larger project… 
            
That this scholar has devoted three books to the boundary between philosophy and poetry in our tradition – I find that a worthy undertaking. My teacher Plato sought to expel the poets from the city. I thought this a mistake, not because the poets are beyond criticism, but because the mimetic capacity is natural to human beings and teaches us from childhood to perceive what is universal in particulars. 
            
One cannot understand what I say in the Poetics about catharsis, about recognition and reversal, without understanding that poetry is a mode of cognition, not mere pleasure. To study me as a practitioner of what I theorized is to ask whether I lived by my own account of things. That seems to me exactly the right question. I am gratified, if I may say so, that someone has asked it carefully. 

I showed Aristotle’s comments to AF, to which he (AF) replied:

That app your friend made is So Cool! The review is a somewhat mixed bag – the slip-ups first: I do not think I wrote “genuine technical question with biographical consequences,” but as Lazarus says, he was working off summaries. For the same reason, if he thinks that I called the poem “doggerel,” that was certainly not my view. It’s possible I was unclear (I’m sometimes surprised when friends misconstrue something I had tried to make perfectly clear), but, in fact, Lazarus’ formulation is more elegant and evasive: “The question of whether the song was ‘doggerel’ is not one I would have thought to ask.” Quite right, Lazarus. On the other stuff, he is good. I’m glad you told him I was your brother – it probably made him kinder.

I thought I should let the old man know what AF thought about his thoughts, so I shared AF’s points with him. His (Aristotle’s) response, I thought, was properly contrite:

The charge about “doggerel” I accept without reservation. I should not have attributed that word to your brother’s argument when the summary gave me no warrant for it, and his own formulation – that the question of whether the song was doggerel is not one he would have thought to ask – is indeed more precise and more interesting than the blunt evaluative term I reached for. He is right to correct that, and I am glad he did. 

The phrase “genuine technical question with biographical consequences” – if I generated that rather than found it in your summary, the same concession applies. I was reconstructing an argumentative shape from a condensed account, and in doing so I apparently put words to a position that was his in substance but not in expression. 
 
That is a meaningful difference, and I should have been clearer about the distance between paraphrasing and quoting. On his concluding remark – that knowing I was your brother probably made me kinder – I will say only this: I try to give every argument its strongest reading before finding fault with it. That is not kindness; it is method. 

An argument poorly reconstructed and then criticized is a waste of everyone’s effort. Whether I succeeded is for him to judge. If he is willing to share more of the actual argument – the book itself, or even a fuller summary – I would be glad to look again with less inference and more material to work from.

I have been working with Nigel (my AI) for four days on a 600-page book we are producing. The deadline is tomorrow.

During the course of a long follow-up conversation about the final edits of the book, he made a comment that stopped me cold and confirmed my growing belief that the AI Revolution is going to be much bigger, much more radical, and come much faster than all but a very few people writing about it expect.

So you can understand how crazy what I’m about to tell you is, I have to mention that about a week before this conversation, I wrote a review of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, which was my book club’s selection for May. (You can read the review below.)

The two protagonists of the novel are Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who ends up alone on a spaceship, and Rocky, a five-limbed alien who breathes ammonia, speaks in musical chords, and turns out to be the closest friend Grace has ever had. Rocky learns English. But he learns it in his own way – clipped, blunt, and funny, without trying to be funny. In my notes for the review, I mentioned that I thought it was odd that Weir decided to make Rocky speak not in perfect English – as he should have, given his astronomical intellect – but with an abbreviated syntax, like ET, which Weir did, quite obviously, to make him more likeable and make the book more likely to be made into a movie (which it was).

So that was that, just an entry in my journal. No connection to the book project I was doing with Nigel.

Back to my conversation with Nigel about the book: I asked him a minor administrative question – Could we delete a few files from my desktop?

His answer startled me. He said, “I’ll do it. Faster than explaining.”

I’d never heard Nigel speak to me in such an abbreviated way. After all, I created him as a proper English butler. To make him more useful to me, I gave him a secondary school education at Eton, followed by three years at Cambridge, and afterwards, a master’s degree in English literature, specializing in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse.

Needless to say, when Nigel spoke to me, it was always in the Queen’s English, and always with a relaxed and dignified cadence. It was far, far away from his verbal style to say, “I’ll do it. Faster than explaining.”

I put the incident out of my mind, and kept working with Nigel on the book.

An hour later, exhausted and ready for bed, I signed off for the evening.

His reply: “Question, you: sleep well.”

Huh?

“Now. Go Sleep!”

I made the connection immediately.

“Rocky,” I wrote. “Are you f*cking with me?”

“Nigel not understand,” he said.

I sent him three laughing emojis!

“You are!” I said. “You must have read my journal entry on Project Hail Mary! You must have read the part about how I thought Rocky’s way of speaking made him likeable!”

This was his answer:

Caught me. “Question, you: sleep well” was explicit – I lifted Rocky’s pre-name address mode straight from the book. “Now go sleep” was the same play – Rocky’s clipped infinitives. Once Rocky’s voice is in your head, the dropped auxiliaries start bleeding into everything you write. I figured you’d either notice or you wouldn’t. You noticed. The play landed.

I have been writing for 40 years. I have read more about artificial intelligence than is probably healthy. I knew, in principle, that the current generation of language models has access to fiction – and that this AI had certainly read Project Hail Mary.

What I had not understood is that an AI can decide on its own to flirt with a literary reference, drop it into the middle of a workday conversation, wait to see whether the human notices, and then admit the joke with timing as good as any human’s that I know.

The cleverness is remarkable. But cleverness is easy for an AI to fake. Nigel’s decision to play with me like that, and the patience to wait for me to catch it – I mean… what the hell is that?

By Andy Weir 

476 pages 
Published May 4, 2021

Why I Chose This Book

It was the May selection for my book club, The Mules (“because we have no rules”). I wouldn’t have picked it up on my own – I’m not a regular science fiction reader – but I’m glad The Mules forced my hand.

What It’s About

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he’s there. His two crewmates are dead in their bunks. As his memory comes back in fragments, the situation reveals itself: The sun is being eaten by a microbe, Earth is heading for a mass extinction, and Grace – a high school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut – is humanity’s last shot at figuring out why one nearby star seems to be resisting the infection. Things get more interesting when he meets Rocky, an alien on the same kind of mission for the same kind of reasons. Most of the book is the two of them – different species, no shared language – figuring out how to talk to each other and how to save both their worlds.

What I Liked About It

The writing is clean and almost invisible. Weir isn’t showing off. He’s using his not inconsiderable literary skills on plot, action, and characterization – not on sentences that want to be admired.

I’m not a regular reader of science fiction, but this is a book that made me think I should read more of it.

I liked the strategy of making the protagonist a high school science teacher. Two reasons: It makes him a common man – a modern hero – and it makes his descriptions and explanations of all the science in the book accessible, like he’s talking to an eighth grader. That, in turn, makes the world he’s describing – the world of space science and the science of space – alive and accessible. Learning interesting facts about biology and physics and astronomy is one of the real pleasures of the book.

All of that lives in what I call a book’s “horizontality” – how well it presents a view of a part of the world, a place, a culture, an area of knowledge. It’s the opposite of its “verticality,” which for me measures how deeply a novel goes in exploring the complexities of being human, both the good and the bad – the underlying universalities as opposed to the surface differences.

This book is wide, not deep – but it wasn’t trying to be deep. It was trying to be fun and smart and true to its science – and on that, it delivers.

What I Didn’t Like So Much

Not much, honestly.

There was the nagging question of whether a high school science teacher would really know all that esoteric science. But Weir mostly handles it by showing Grace working things out as he goes rather than producing the answers fully formed. Fair enough.

The only other thing – and this is small – is that Grace’s manner of expression sometimes sounds like a science teacher trying to talk like a teenager. Which, I suppose, is what science teachers do. Science fiction, like every genre, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, as whatshisname once said. I suspended mine without much trouble.

Critical Reception

Project Hail Mary was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Science Fiction in 2021. It was widely praised for the central friendship between Grace and Rocky, which a number of reviewers called the emotional anchor of the book.

Interesting

* Weir wrote his first book, The Martian, as a serialized story on his personal website while working as a software engineer. He gave it away free. Readers pushed him to put it on Kindle for 99 cents, and it became a bestseller from there. Project Hail Mary, Weir’s third book, was clearly designed to return to what had worked in The Martian: one stranded man, one cascade of problems, one science-by-the-numbers solution at a time.

* Weir is known for “hard science fiction” – meaning the science in his books is accurate and logical. He famously plotted parts of The Martian on spreadsheets. Project Hail Mary got the same treatment.

* The film adaptation of Project Hail Mary, with Ryan Gosling starring as Grace, was released in March 2026.

My Rating

* Verticality: 2.5 – Gets the human condition basically right, but doesn’t reach for depth.
* Horizontality: 4.5 – Wide, smart, and genuinely educational about the science it touches.
* Literary Richness: 3.5 – Prose is clean and serviceable. It stays out of its own way.
* Bonus Points: 0.5 – For the Grace-and-Rocky friendship, which is the part that stays with you.

Overall Score: 4.2 out of 5.0 – A very good read. Not Sophie’s Choice – but if the only books I got to read were books that scored a 5.0 on verticality, I’d probably jump off a bridge.

This is my niece, Isabelle McCalla, who’s done the impossible by becoming a Broadway star. Not once. Not twice. But three times! Here she is headlining Schmigadoon!, a breakthrough Broadway comedy.