Christopher Mills (ed.), Noir Quarterly (1994–95)

In order to read one of the Maze Agency prose stories, I picked up the first and only issue of Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly from Alpha Productions. This actually was not very easy to do: one of those old comics that not so much expensive as unavailable!Published at the comics size, it was mostly made up of detective prose stories with just one comics story, plus a couple nonfiction features. Despite the subtitle and the grand ambitions of editor Christopher Mills (who also edited The Detectives one-shot from Alpha, in which a short Maze Agency comics story appeared), it only lasted one issue. 

Mills later revived the concept under the slightly different title of Noir Quarterly at CFD... though as he admits in a retrospective on his blog, the publication frequency was "way-too-optimistic." There are no Maze Agency stories in those issues, but look—I like collecting interesting and unusual comics, and if tacking two more issues of something onto my order can get me a complete set, then I'll do it. Plus those two issues had beautiful femme fatale–themed covers! (They're both by Brian Stelfreeze, who much much later would be the first artist on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run.)

All three issues have similar contents, though not always in the same proportions: predominantly, there are illustrated prose stories, with a couple comics. Most of the material is new, but sometimes there's archival material; one of the comics in Noir Quarterly #1 is from 1955, for example, and a few of the prose stories are reprints, though Mills says he prioritized reprinting stuff that was otherwise uncollected. There are also nonfiction features: book reviews, movie reviews, interviews, and retrospectives on some topic of interest to the audience, like old movies or comics.

from Noir Quarterly #1
(script by Ron Fortier, art by Gary Kato & Steve Crompton)

Like any anthology, the prose stories are hit-or-miss, but there definitely was enough good stuff here to make it all worth reading. Though I was drawn to the series by The Maze Agency, I would say the majority of the prose stories are not detective fiction. Ones I particularly liked included "Surrogate" by Ed Gorman (illustrated by Richard Pace, from Noir vol. 1 #1), where a lawyer confronts the teenager who might be responsible for the death of his own son; "The Love Rack" by Max Allan Collins (illustrated by Blackhawk's Rick Burchett, from Noir vol. 1 #1), a gritty story about a private eye who gets caught in political conspiracy; "A Fine Officer" by C. J. Henderson (illustrated by Michael Harris, from Noir Quarterly #1), where a detective becomes caught in a gang civil war; and "They're Gonna Kill You after a While" by Ron Goulart (from Noir #2), about a detective investigating the disappearance of an actor who once played a Saint-like character in a series of films. This last story was illustrated by Brian Michael Bendis of all people; I had no idea he was also an illustrator! Of the ones I liked, only this last one was a mystery.

I don't read much "noir"; having gotten this sampling, I think what I don't like are ones that seem a bit... gratuitous. I don't mind cynicism, but sometimes it moves over into crassness. I didn't care for "Fool's Gold" by William Marden (illustrated by Darren Goodhart, from Noir vol. 1 #1), which goes on a long time for a mediocre ending, during which you have to read a lot about men ogling a teenage girl. Particularly bad, I thought, were two stories from Noir #2: "Granny Gumption Solves a Murder" by C. J. Henderson & Charles Hoffman (illustrated by Michael Harris) and "The Wallow" by Ardath Mayhar (illustrated by Delfin Barral). The former has a decent joke at its core, about Miss Marple–type characters, but then gets nasty; the latter is pretty obvious from its very beginning but takes a long time to get there.

from Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly #1
(script by Nicola Cuti, art by Joe Staton)

The amount of comics content varies heavily. Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton's Michael Mauser character appears in both Noir vol. 1 #1 and vol. 2 #2 (he also appeared in the Detectives one-shot). I like the Joe Staton art, of course, but I think the first story suffered from the fact that I have read no other stories about the character than these three: when his brother popped up as part of a solution to a mystery, it was a bit jarring as there was no previous hint he had a brother! But I would read more about this guy. That's the only comics story in vol. 1 #1, but Noir Quarterly #2 has two: a mediocre Johnny Dynamite reprint from 1955, plus a new story by Ron Fortier with art by Gary Kato & Steve Crompton. This same team also supply one of Noir #2's three comic stories, and Ron Fortier scripts another story for issue #2 with art by Randy Buccini & Byron Peneranda. I don't think any of these are high art, but I do think everyone involved very much understood the assignment, and I enjoyed all of them. My favorite was probably the one in Noir Quarterly #1, "Blood Red Lips," about a dangerous femme fatale with a twist.

I did find the nonfiction features pretty interesting, though there were too many of them in Noir #2. This is a whole world I don't know very much, and since I will probably never have enough time in my life to delve into more deeply, I appreciate how other people can give me access. The book reviews were usually interesting enough, but things I particularly enjoyed included the interview with Mickey Spillane by Mills from Noir Quarterly #1 (I've never read any of his work, but he seems fascinating) and the overview of The Saint and Falcon films by Ed Gorman from Noir #2 (what a weird production history... though my guess more interesting to read about than to watch the actual films).

Overall, this was a decent package, though I did find Mills's editorial voice a bit grating at times. Not always great work here, but distinctive and interesting, a nice teaser into a wider world I am unlikely to delve more into, to be honest, but I am glad I tracked down and read it all!

Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly vol. 1 originally appeared in one issue (Winter 1994). The stories were written Ed Gorman, Wendi Lee, Mike W. Barr, Nicola Cuti, William Marden, and Max Allan Collins, and illustrated by Richard Pace, Terry Beatty, Rick Magyar, Joe Staton, Darren Goodhart, and Rick Burchett, with nonfiction features by Jeff Gelb, Eric Davidson, and Christopher Mills. The series was edited by Christopher Mills.

Noir [Quarterly] vol. 2* originally appeared in two issues (Apr.-Fall 1995). The stories were written by Joe Gill,† William F. Nolan, Robert J. Randisi, William Marden, Ron Fortier, C. J. Henderson (with Charles Hoffman), Nicola Cuti, Ardath Mayhar, and Ron Goulart, and illustrated by Bill Molno & Vince Alascia,† Rick Burchett, Flint Henry, Bob Cram, Jr., Gary Kato & Steve Crompton, Michael Harris, Joe Staton, Mike Harris, Delfin Barral, Brian Michael Bendis, and Randy Buccini & Byron Peneranda, with nonfiction features by Ron Fortier, Christopher Mills, Eric Davidson, Jonathan Anger, Bill Spangler, James Chambers, and Ed Gorman. The series was edited by Christopher Mills. 

* The first issue was titled Noir Quarterly, the second just Noir.

† The Johnny Dynamite story "The Fixer's Mob" (a reprint from 1955) is not credited in the issue; credits courtesy the Grand Comics Database.

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, David Messina, et al.

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation

Collection published: 2010
Acquired: June 2021
Read: October 2025

I spent some time late last year into early this year reading my way through the various "Kelvin timeline" comics and novels. Some of them I reviewed on the TrekBBS, though I fell behind. But what I never got around to doing was posting those reviews here. So, finally, time to do it!

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #1-6 (Feb.-Aug. 2010)

screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, pencils by David Messina with Claudia Balboni, inks by Gaetano Carlucci, colors by Giaovanna Niro and Ilaria Traversi, letters by Robbie Robbins and Neil Uyetake

I was kind of worried about this book going in; in my experience, most comics adaptations of films are not up to much, often reading as a condensed version of a story optimized for a different medium.

To my surprise, then, scripters Mike Johnson & Tim Jones and artist David Messina deliver a pretty strong retelling of the 2009 film. I mean, it won't knock your world alight, but it does a good job of hitting the beats of the story via the medium of comics. Probably this is at least partially because it's been given a whole six issues, so (mostly) it's not too compressed. But also Johnson/Jones/Messina have good pacing instincts, sometimes piling a lot of panels into a single page, sometimes using double-page spreads in order to capture a key moment. Clearly also some thought was put into putting issue endpoints at key moments, so that each issue works as a unit.

from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #5
(art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci)

The result is an adaptation that reads fairly genuinely as a comic. It's probably at its best when covering the earlier parts of the story; it's not until the end of issue #3 that Nero's attack begins, so the early parts of the book have a lot of space to unfold key moments like the destruction of the Kelvin or the reveal of the Enterprise in space. On the other hand, moments like Kirk's and Spock's fight on the bridge are given numerous panels on a single page, really giving them an impact.

Indeed, issue #4 is probably the one compression hurt the most; the drill battle is just not interesting in this format, with key moments like Sulu's unfolding sword going by too quick to leave an impression, and I found the death of Amanda way too rushed to give it the import it needed, and then the issue's final panel, weirdly, does not clearly communicate the destruction of Vulcan. The unnecessary Galaxy Questeseque second climax of the film, where the Enterprise is almost pulled into a black hole, comes across as even more unnecessary here.

from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #4
(art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci)

The book's solicits trumpeted the inclusion of cut material, but this mostly seems to just be a couple lines of dialogue here and there. David Messina is a longstanding Star Trek artist for IDW, and he mostly does a good job here, though I struggled a bit with his likeness for Bruce Greenwood's Pike. Overall I think this does exactly what it needed to, and did it well. Probably the best comics adaptation of a Star Trek film other than the two by Peter David.

This is the first in a series of posts about the Kelvin timeline Star Trek comics (and novels). The next installment covers More Beautiful than Death.

What Is the Pangram AI Detector's False-Positive Rate for LLM-Generated Prose?

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I spent a lot of time this summer battling bots on Reddit. I would like to say I'm pretty good by now at identifying the cadences of LLM-generated prose, especially in Reddit posts—LLM-generated Reddit posts tend to have some very specific tics. (If you want to see them in action, a very useful thing to do is to ask ChatGPT to make you a Reddit post, and you'll see how much it is like all the posts you've seen elsewhere.)

But my sense of how LLM-generated something is is not definitive proof, so in my Reddit bot takedowns, I tend also to link to AI-detector results. Fairly often, someone pops up to claim AI detectors are unreliable. I'm not so sure. I mean, I am sure there are some unreliable ones out there (anyone can create a site and claim it's an AI detector), but that doesn't mean they all are.

My poking around has turned up that it seems like the consensus is the top three are GPTZero, Pangram, and Turnitin. Obviously Turnitin is only useful to people in the academic ecosystem; I've settled on using Pangram in my Reddit takedowns, because you can link to your results page and you get a decent number of tests per day on the free account.

There are two ways to think about the reliability of these tools. First is the false-negative rate. How often do they identify something that is LLM-generated as not LLM-generated? And then there's the false-positive rate. How often do they identify something that is not LLM-generated as LLM-generated? For this post, I'm focusing on the latter. This is important in the context of calling out people on Reddit and also on calling out students: if you make an accusation, you want to know that the positive result of the AI detector is reliable. (In the context of identifying academic misconduct, you also don't want a high false-negative rate: if a ton of students using LLMs are not being flagged, that's annoying... but that's a different issue than the one I'm discussing here.)

Pangram claims a false-positive rate of 0.0041% in their own materials. But, of course, they are incentivized to claim to have really low ones! What I have been curious about, then, is what independent studies turn up. Specifically, I was looking for sources where the writers used Pangram themselves on a corpus of known human-written work, and used that to calculate a false-positive rate. (Or, where I could use their data to calculate it, if they didn't do it themselves.) I excluded anything that was directly published by Pangram itself, or anyone working for Pangram. (Fun fact, though: Adam et al. is published by Pangram competitor GPTZero!) Here's what I have been able to find.* I have sorted the results by denominator, i.e., I start with the study that had the largest corpus of human-generated texts and work my way down to the smallest. To make this table legible, I just included author names in it; full citations are in my Works Cited at the end of this post.

Source	Peer Review?	Specific Citation	False-Positive Rate
Evanko and Di Natale	Conference paper	Calibrated on abstracts from 2021 to 2022 (slide 4).	0.22% (40/18,467)
Adam et al.	Preprint	Tables 1-2 on p. 7 give the accuracy (all texts classified correctly) and recall (true-positive rate) across five domains, each of which consists of 1,000 AI texts and 1,000 human texts; only in one domain did Pangram have 2 false positives.	~0.04% (~2/5,000)
Elazar and Antoniak	Preprint	“We test [...] Pangram on CS papers from 2020- 2022. We find that [...] Pangram did not predict any false positives” (p. 3); they sampled 100 papers per month for the three pre-LLM years of 2020-22 (p. 4).	0.0% (0/3,600)
Saha et al.	Peer reviewed	“For reviews that are fully human written, Pangram flags none of them as ‘AI’ or ‘Mixed’” (p. 3); number of human reviews given on p. 5.	0.0% (0/3,499)
Jabarian and Imas	No	“FPR is essentially zero across all thresholds 0.5 and greater” (p. 10); number of human texts given on p. 5.	0.1% (2/1,992)
Day	No	“~1,000 random abstracts were retrieved from articles published in 2010”; “1 positive detection in 2010 data.”	0.1% (1/974)
Shah and Levy	Preprint	“The pre-AI period (2019–2022) yields 1 detection across 800 documents, a rate of 0.1%” (p. 28).	0.1% (1/800)
Lee	No	“Pangram and GPTZero correctly flagged no human writing as AI.”	0.0% (0/495)
Karr et al.	Conference paper	FPR for 2013-15 control period given in Table 2 on p. 3; number of human texts given in Table 1 on p. 2.	0.0% (0/306)
Saha and Feizi	Conference paper	FPR given in Table 6 on p. 25426.	0.0% (0/300)
Allaham and Diakopoulos	Preprint	“In our evaluation of both Pangram and GPTZero on a curated dataset of 200 human-authored texts [...], we find that Pangram and GPTZero have 100% accuracy in correctly detecting human-authored and AI-generated texts, respectively” (p. 3).	0.0% (0/200)
Lu et al.	No	No AI-generated papers found in the 2022 control group (Table 2).	0.0% (0/159)
Russell et al.	Peer reviewed	FPR given in Table 2.B on p. 5346; “Each experiment consists of 60 articles, 30 human-written and 30 LLM-generated” (p. 5343), and there were five experiments.	2.0% (3/150)
Chakrabarty et al.	Preprint	“Human written text was never misclassified” (fig. 2E, p. 5).	0.0% (0/150)
Ren et al.	Preprint	Ran a control on abstracts posted to arXiv in 2010: “Pangram also perfectly classifies the human abstracts” (p. 42).	0.0% (0/100)
Guppenberger	Preprint	FPR given in Table 2 on p. 10.	0.0% (0/50)
Van Vlasselaer et al.	Peer reviewed	“The results for fully human-written texts show that all four tools classified 100% of human texts correctly as ‘True Negatives’ [...]. This indicates that none of the detectors are prone to incorrectly flagging human writing as AI-generated for this collection of papers” (p. 12).	0.0% (0/40)

You'll see that the majority of independent tests give Pangram a 0% false-positive rate, including one where the corpus included 3,600 texts! If you just crudely average all of the false-positive rates from all seventeen studies, the mean false-positive rate is 0.15%. If you pool all the numerators and denominators, you get 49 / 36,282, which is a false positive rate of 0.14%.†

This would suggest that it would take you 658 submissions to find one false positive according to the crude mean, and 740 submissions to find one false positive according to the pooled average. So overall, Pangram has a very low false-positive rate, and thus you should feel entitled to make LLM-use accusations with a high degree of confidence if you have a Pangram score as support.

Note that many of these studies had other goals in mind than just assessing the false-positive rate of Pangram, so in some cases, it's a very small part of a wider topic. Often, this other stuff is quite interesting: Ren et al. and Karr et al. both discuss, for example, the susceptibility of LLM detectors like Pangram to attempts to evade AI detection, thus resulting in a higher false-negative rate. (It's worth pointing out that some other of these studies, such as Russell et al., Jabarian and Imas, and Van Vlasselaer et al. tried out evasion techniques that Pangram was able to still detect, however.)

One that I found particularly interesting was Russell et al., whose purpose was to compare automated detection tools to human beings' own ability to detect LLM-generated prose. They hired human beings to annotate their pool of texts, and found that

annotators who rarely or never use LLMs are poor detectors of AI-generated text; in fact, they overestimate their own ability to perform the task by providing high confidence scores for their decisions. We identify a subset of five high-performing annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks (e.g., editing, copywriting, creative writing). The majority vote of this subset of “expert” annotators fails to predict the correct label on only one out of 300 articles. (5342–3)

In fact, only Pangram outperformed their group of "expert" annotators. (This might account for my own ability to detect LLM-generated prose; while I have certainly never used ChatGPT to generate content for this blog or academic writing, I do mess with it a lot in other ways, including helping me devise images and Tasks for my Star Trek Adventures scenarios and perform analyses on my iTunes library, so I have seen a lot of its prose in action by now.)

The other study I found particularly interesting was Lu et al. This was done by the chairs of a track at the conference NeurIPS, who "made the decision to require that all papers be substantially human-written, with AI used for only copy-editing or similar peripheral changes..." They partnered with Pangram to enforce this policy, and used papers from 2022 as a control. 0% of those papers were identified by Pangram as AI-written. When they used it on the 2026 batch, they had to outright desk-reject 18.4% of submissions for AI use, and ask for "evidence of substantial human engagement" on another 12.7%. A full 30% of people used AI to write their position papers knowing that this track of NeurIPS had a no-AI policy! It's not just undergraduate students who can't be bothered to obey academic integrity rules, and who don't think about the implications of using LLMs for their writing tasks.

* Full disclosure: this is a combination of sources I found myself and supplemental ones found for me by ChatGPT (and one by the world's most underachieving LLM, Google Gemini). ChatGPT also helped me do the HTML formatting for my table and Works Cited.

† There were two other pieces I chose not to include in my table above, partially because they were just published by individuals on Substack, but they are both also interesting reading. @VeryFinePrint OCRed forty-six undigitized old books, which came out to 8,025 of what Pangram calls "segments," and got false positives on just 4 segments, so 0.05%... but it turned out that in all four segments, their AI-based OCR program had hallucinated text, so Pangram was accurately detecting AI-written segments! The other, by Kelly, states that he tested 96,468 essays and got just 10 false negatives and 1 false positive, but doesn't actually state how many of the 96,468 essays were human-written, so we don't know what the denominator should be. I have included both sources on the Works Cited below.

Works Cited

Adam, George Alexandru, et al. “GPTZero: Robust Detection of LLM-Generated Texts.” arXiv, 13 Feb. 2026, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2602.13042.

Allaham, Mowafak, and Nicholas Diakopoulos. “Synthetic Sources?: Auditing Generative Search Engine Citations for Evidence of AI-Generated Sources.” arXiv, 22 May 2026, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2605.23684.

Chakrabarty, Tuhin, et al. “Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers.” SSRN, 19 Aug. 2026, doi: 10.2139/ssrn.5606570.

Day, Adam. “GenAI Detection That Actually Works.” Clear Skies, Medium, 18 Aug. 2025, clearskiesadam.medium.com/genai-detection-that-actually-works-edc562581fed.

Elazar, Yanai, and Maria Antoniak. “LLM-Generated or Human-Written? Comparing Review and Non-Review Papers on arXiv.” arXiv, 19 Jan. 2026, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.17036.

Evanko, Daniel S., and Michael Di Natale. “Quantifying and Assessing the Use of Generative AI by Authors and Reviewers in the Cancer Research Field.” International Conference on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, 3 Sept. 2025, peerreviewcongress.org/abstract/quantifying-and-assessing-the-use-of-generative-ai-by-authors-and-reviewers-in-the-cancer-research-field.

Guppenberger, James. “Vernacular Remote Control: Adversarial Robustness Testing of Six Commercial AI Text Detectors on Provenance-Guaranteed Pre-AI Prose.” Research Square, 12 June 2026, doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9596240/v1.

Jabarian, Brian, and Alex Imas. “Artificial Writing and Automated Detection.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Sept. 2025, doi: 10.3386/w34223.

Karr, Jonathan A., Jr., et al. “Why AI Detection Fails for Academic Integrity.” ACM AI Leadership Summit, 20 Aug. 2026. arXiv, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2608.11256.

Kelly, Trent. “Practical Attacks on AI Text Classifiers with RL.” Substack, 8 July 2025, trentmkelly.substack.com/p/practical-attacks-on-ai-text-classifiers.

Lee, Jaeho. “AI Detectors Rarely Flag Human Writing, but Sometimes Miss AI Text Imitating Real Authors.” Epoch AI, 15 July 2026, epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-detectors-false-negatives.

Lu, Alex, et al. “AI-Generated Papers in the NeurIPS 2026 Position Paper Track.” NeurIPS, 2 June 2026, blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/ai-generated-papers-in-the-neurips-2026-position-paper-track.

Ren, Kevin, et al. “Hitting a Moving Target: Test-Time Adaptation for AI Text Detection under Continual Distribution Shift.” arXiv, 23 June 2026, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.25152.

Russell, Jenna, et al. “People Who Frequently Use ChatGPT for Writing Tasks Are Accurate and Robust Detectors of AI-Generated Text.” Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2025, pp. 5342–73. ACL Anthology, doi: 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.267.

Saha, Rounak, et al. “Policies Permitting LLM Use for Polishing Peer Reviews Are Currently Not Enforceable.” International Conference on Machine Learning, 23 June 2026. arXiv, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2603.20450.

Saha, Shoumik, and Soheil Feizi. “Almost AI, Almost Human: The Challenge of Detecting AI-Polished Writing.” Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2025, pp. 25414–31. ACL Anthology, doi: 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1303.

Shah, Anand, and Joshua Levy. “Access to Justice in the Age of AI: Evidence from U.S. Federal Courts.” SSRN, 21 May 2026, doi: 10.2139/ssrn.6766859.

Van Vlasselaer, Marijke, et al. “Who Wrote This? Evaluating the Reliability of AI Detection Tools in Higher Education.” International Journal for Educational Integrity, vol. 22, 29 June 2026. Springer Nature Link, doi: 10.1007/s40979-026-00226-w.

@VeryFinePrint. “Scanning for Pangram Errors.” Substack, 15 July 2026, veryfineprint.substack.com/p/scanning-for-pangram-errors.

The Maze Agency: "The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr et al.

Somewhat belatedly—I think while writing up the previous post in this sequence—I discovered that there were actually three Maze Agency short stories that had been published outside of the regular Maze Agency comic series. One was a comic story published in a one-shot from Alpha Productions called The Detectives; the other two were prose stories, which could be found in an installment of the quarterly series Noir (a mix of comics and prose) and an anthology called Sex, Lies and Private Eyes. So I tracked them down to cap off this series. (When the hypothetical Maze Agency omnibus is released, hopefully it will include them all.)

The comic story in Detectives #1 (which has a cover by original Maze Agency ongoing artist Adam Hughes), "The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident," is just ten pages, and so can't be as complicated as most Maze Agency stories, but is pretty good regardless. Its main downside is that you only get any clues at all about a page before it's all revealed, so there's not really a chance to "play along" as the reader... but it's not like I was ever going to do that successfully in any case! Paul Pelletier is a solid artist here (I mostly know him from small bits and bobs on series like The Darkstars or Blue and Gold), and I would have gladly seen more Maze Agency from him.

The other two are, like I said, prose stories. It's weird when characters originated in comics make the jump to prose, in my opinion; I think a lot of time there's a kind of flatness. Comics tell you interiority through  mostly external cues, especially in a series like The Maze Agency, which has no narration. I spent some time reading a bunch of superhero-comics-turned-prose-stories, and I found it was hard to imagine a lot of superhero characters as actually having vivid interior lives—not just for me, but obviously for the writers! Mike Barr isn't inexperienced in prose (I actually read a couple of his prose Star Trek works two decades ago now), but he doesn't really go for interiority at all here: the narrator is distant from Jen and Gabe. This can work in a detective story, but it did make me feel like these weren't really playing to the strengths of the medium.

from Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly #1

Weirdly, both "The Heat Is On" and "Murder Gone Wylde" are about pornography: the former about an adult video store, and the latter about a producer of porn DVDs. I found "The Heat Is On" had a good sense of atmosphere that worked well, but the actual mystery was slight; "Murder Gone Wylde" has an engaging set of characters and suspects, and was a lot of fun... unfortunately, I think it might have been even more fun as an actual comic! Still, as one last way to spend time with Jen and Gabe (and Lieutenant Bliss, etc.), you could do a lot worse. Did Barr ever write any original mystery novels? I feel like he could have done good things with that canvas.

"The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Detectives (Apr. 1993). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, pencilled by Paul Pelletier, inked by Bob Cram Jr., lettered by Susan Dorne, and edited by Christopher Mills. 

"The Heat Is On" originally appeared in issue #1 of Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly (Winter 1994). The story was written Mike W. Barr, illustrated by Rick Magyar, and edited by Christopher Mills. 

"Murder Gone Wylde" originally appeared in Sex, Lies and Private Eyes (2009). The story was written by Mike W. Barr and edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr.

This is the last in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91)
3. The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1-3 (1997-98)
4. The Maze Agency vol. 3 #1-3 & vol. 4 #1 (2005-23)

Two related posts cover Noir Quarterly and Sex, Lies and Private Eyes.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow

July 2387
My guess is that I am going to reach book III of Coda and decide Coda was a bad idea. Some might roll their eyes at this declaration, but I just want to put my cards on the table as a reviewer. People are allowed to go into works of art with a suspicion of what they will think about them, contra the opinions of some creators. But, also, maybe I am wrong! Certainly I have my own thoughts on what a "novelverse" wrapup trilogy should have done, but we'll see.

Star Trek: Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow
by James Swallow

Published: 2021
Acquired: October 2021
Read: August 2025

That said, if it had to be done this way, The Ashes of Tomorrow is probably about the best it could have been done. James Swallow's novel picks up from the end of book I, Moments Asunder, with Devidians devouring the galaxy. Whereas Moments Asunder mostly focused on the Enterprise-E crew, this book begins with them, but as it goes on, increasingly focuses on the Deep Space Nine cast. Yes, Picard and Worf are there, but the series cast who are all there, getting the spotlight, are the DS9 ones.

It's really effective. One of the great things the original DS9 relaunch did was be willing to move on from the tv characters in the configuration we had known them... but this does mean that it's been eleven years of story time and twenty years of real time since Sisko, Kira, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, Quark, Jake, and Nog got together to solve a problem as a team. Swallow very effectively hits the nostalgia button here; I loved the scene where they all end up together, trying to figure out what can be done about this problem. Swallow has a very strong command of their voices.

If I have a complaint, it's that while most of the novel-original characters (e.g., Taran'atar, Vaughn) had been killed off by this point, we don't get a return appearance by, say, Shar or Prynn. This is the end of the litverse after all; most of these characters could be seen again... but not Shar! There is at least a lot of Ro Laren. (James Swallow can't make the USS Robinson crew interesting, alas, but he does wisely avoid even mentioning most of David R. George's other post–Typhon Pact recurring cast. Sorry not sorry, Jefferson Blackmer. You will forever be Starfleet's worst and most boring chief of security. Your space station is being purposefully destroyed, and your boss doesn't even mention you.)

Almost all of the characters get great moments. Nog dies—but he dies saving Jake. Jake saves the lives of a bunch of civilians (and we learn he wrote a novel based on the events of Rising Son). Quark and Ro have a genuinely emotional scene about growing old together. Odo gets a couple good gotcha moments. O'Brien's death isn't as impactful as some, but he goes out swinging. I found that Swallow captured Quark best of all. I liked that it was Quark who most objected to the plan to destroy the wormhole, and the scene where he says he's staying behind to protect what's most precious to him, which Ro initially thinks means the bar, but turns out to mean her, is great. Quark always comes through when it matters, and Swallow nailed that here. (Also good: "it's very presumptuous of you to assume that I'd just go along with this, without complaint." "I never assumed you wouldn't complain.")

I wasn't a huge fan, though, of how the Bajoran prohecy was just a maguffin, only of relevance as yet another portent of the apocalypse. At its best, DS9 managed to also use stuff like that to say something interesting about faith, but that's absent here.

This book also does the "flashes of random established characters in action scenes to show the scope of the crisis" thing more effectively than Moments Asunder, with appearances by Martok and Klag, for example. No full-on IKS Gorkon, but I'll take what I can get. (Has there been a da Vinci reference in this series? I haven't noticed one yet.) We also get a lot of random callbacks, which I enjoyed because it fits the tone of the series. Who would have thought a key plot point in this trilogy would reference Keith DeCandido's The Brave and the Bold duology!? Or that there'd a passing reference to The Janus Gate trilogy of all things!?! (Had that ever even been referenced by another "novelverse" book before?) (The thing this book needed, though, to really complete the vibe was comic book–style footnotes explaining this references. Those parts should have had a note at the bottom of the page attributed to "Editing Ed" or something.)

My big complaint is that if this book is our last chance to see the novels' Admiral Riker—and especially, the novels' version of the Titan—I'm pretty disappointed with the choice to go with a "Riker is crazy and has to hunt Picard" subplot. Not only did we (as the book itself points out) do this quite recently in Takedown,* but it means we can't really get any POV scenes from any Titan characters, as it would lampshade how little sense it makes that they're all going along with Riker's plan. Disappointing, given how 1) Titan was one of my favorite novel-original concepts, and 2) Swallow is typically very good at writing the Titan crew.

Longtime readers know of my dislike of the novels' version of the mirror universe, so the end of this book has me worried, but on its own, this was about as good an installment as I could have hoped for.

Continuity Notes:

• Because of the way the novels have jumped around in time, you end up with weirdness like Rugiero being Sisko's first officer for (arguably) longer than Kira was. You'll never make me believe it.
• Here we learn Tom Paris is on Akaar's staff. Tom was in Moments Asunder, but I thought just because he had experience with this kind of malarkey thanks to "Year of Hell"; if he was working for Akaar there too, I missed it.
• Here we learn what nickname Wesley has for his half-brother René. Was this preestablished? I can't remember any meaningful interactions between the two in earlier books, but perhaps it was in Cold Equations.
• There is a dog on Picard's vineyard (c.f., Picard season one). It's funny, because I think of the "novelverse" as so separate from the modern shows, it was quite jarring every time there was an explicit reference to them: for example, that Boreth is a source of time crystals (as seen in Discovery). The most effective one is probably when you realize part of Riker's motivation is this feeling that he ought to have two kids and live in a cabin in the wilderness (Picard: "Nepenthe"); I wish the book had leaned into that more, it could have made evil Riker work.
• Given how many books were referenced here, it struck me as quite pointed that the book makes sure to establish that Saavik and Spock are good friends and great colleagues and no more, contradicting Vulcan's Heart and Vulcan's Soul, even though those books have been previously referenced by other Destiny-era books.
• Alexander and Spock previously met (for some reason) in the Prometheus trilogy. I didn't detect any reference to that here, but I also didn't notice any explicit indication they hadn't met; their first meeting here seems to be between scenes.
• When did Odo resume being constable on DS9? Is this something that happened in another book that I forgot about?
• Look, the Andorian transporter duplicates were dumb. I appreciate this book wrapped that plotline offhandedly, but it should have done so in a way that made it clear what a dumb plotline that was to begin with.
• I didn't buy how little Picard seemed to know about Bashir (p. 287). Surely there was a lot of information on him in the Section 31 files released at the end of Control, and surely Picard would have read all about him!
• Counselor Hegol dies in book I of Coda but pops up here. Whoops.

Other Notes:

• Why is the adjutant of the Federation ambassador to the Klingons a Klingon? That didn't make any sense to me.
• At the beginning of the book, a former disciple of Admiral Dougherty (from Insurrection) gets a lot of setup, but I don't really know why, because he promptly vanishes from the story in favor of the "evil Riker" approach.
• There is a Nick Locarno joke here. James Swallow beat Lower Decks to the punch!
• Jake calls Rebecca his "stepsister" (p. 151), but that's wrong, she's a half-sister.
• Endalla being destroyed in gory detail without a single reference to the "what's up with Endalla" plotline that ran interminably through DRG3's DS9 novels just feels like trolling.
• Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack

* Funny moment: Riker points out Picard gets possessed a lot; Vale retaliates that so does Riker.

The 2026 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on the Final Results

Another year, another season of Hugo reading over with. This year was my tenth year doing it, which means I've been doing it a quarter of my life! As always, I am going to wrap up by giving you my overview on what actually won, and how it compared to what I wanted to win.

Category	What Won	Where I Ranked It	What I Ranked #1	Where It Placed
Best Novel	The Everlasting	2nd	The Incandescent	2nd
I can't complain about this; I wrote of The Everlasting, it "isn't to say I don't want to see it win—I think it's very good." And Emily Tesh has already won the Best Novel Hugo whereas Alix E. Harrow has not, and certainly we know around here that I'm not very big on perennial winners. I predicted, however, that Drop of Corruption would win, and it placed in 3rd. I did correctly identify that Everlasting was very popular, though. Looking at the full nominations list, I'm bummed Ray Nayler can't quite break through here; What the Axe is Buried was in 11th.
Best Novella	The River Has Roots	5th	Cinder House	3rd
Well... at least it wasn't Automatic Noodle! Though that did place in 2nd, despite me putting it under No Award. I liked Cinder House, but I did find this a weak category overall, so I can't get too fussed. Clearly the Hugo electorate and I have very different novella tastes (i.e., they love Tordotcom and I do not). I made no prediction in this category. I think if I had I would have been wrong! The longlist reveals, though, that thankfully we were spared another Nghi Vo novella and another Seanan McGuire one.
Best Novelette	“Never Eaten Vegetables”	1st	“Never Eaten Vegetables”	1st
I called this the "clear and obvious standout" in this category, and obviously everyone else agreed! It had over a hundred more first-round preferences than its nearest competitor. It's a great story in a weak-ish category. I can't believe that the excruciatingly awful Murderbot story tied for 4th, though. It had the most nominations, validating the r/Fantasy commentator who said it felt like it was nominated by people who don't otherwise read short fiction. I was one nomination short of having to read something by John Scalzi. Thank God!
Best Short Story	“In My Country”	3rd	“Wire Mother”	2nd
Though the bottom half of this category was so-so, the top half was quite strong, and I would have been happy to see any my of top three win. And my top three were indeed the voters' top three. And my bottom two were the voters' bottom two. Stay tuned for a forthcoming interview with Thomas Ha in Studies in the Fantastic!
Best Graphic Story or Comic	A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel	2nd	The Invisible Parade	4th
Another year, another indication that the Hugo voters have no understanding of good comics. Paul Cornell's Who Killed Nessie? was two nominations away from the ballot; I haven't read it but I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more than A Girl and Her Fed.
Best Related Work	Inventing the Renaissance	4th	Last War in Albion: “The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)”	5th
I can't believe this won! (I should note that "Best Related Work" is the category where the highest percentage of voters placed No Award not in 1st, but still above the eventual winner, making it the most controversial of the winners.) Moreover, I can't believe "The Cuddled Little Vice" landed all the way down in 5th, only beating out the boring Game of Thrones podcast. What is wrong with people? Yet again, there's a piece about the Hugos themselves on the longlist, but thankfully all the way down in 9th.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)	Sinners	4th	Mickey 17	6th
What is wrong with people!? (Sinners is good, but I am surprised it won against the Andor juggernaut, and I'm surprised so many people ranked Mickey 17 so low; it was a very decisive last place.) Plur1bus was one nomination away from its entire first season making the ballot as a single work.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)	Murderbot: “All Systems Red”	4th	Doctor Who: “The Story & the Engine”	5th
This is disappointing, but unlike the above two categories, not surprising. Weak field this year. There were three different Strange New Worlds episodes on the longlist; I'm guessing none of them were quite standout enough to be a clear focal point for nominations. The disqualifications in this category (three episodes of Andor and one of Murderbot) mean that Wheel of Time got on the ballot even though it was in 10th! It quite decisively came in last.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book	Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe	5th	Sunrise on the Reaping	4th
Sunrise on the Reaping actually had more first-round preference than any other finalist, but very much lost out on transfers, and so ended up all the way down in fourth. I guess some people really liked it... and I guess some people really did not. But Coffeeshop is not a worthy winner. They Bloom at Night was robbed! C'mon, if you're going to give to a queer Asian-American love story, give it to the good one!

I probably should update my "how often do I agree with the Hugo electorate?" analysis. This feels like a below-average year for my favorites, but maybe I am wrong, as I feel like I always think that. I do think I will post my "No Award" analysis.

Still, fun year as always, though near the end of it I was getting tired and needed a break! My favorites across the board (in no particular order) were probably The Incandescent, The Everlasting, "Wire Mother," "Never Eaten Vegetables," "The Cuddled Little Vice," A Drop of Corruption, Mickey 17, Sunrise on the Reaping, They Bloom at Night, "In My Country," and "Missing Helen." There's lot's of good sf&f out there, and I'm as usual thankful to the Hugos for exposing me to it.

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

I received this book for Christmas from LibraryThing's Secret Santa program and, as is my usual practice with such books, tried to go into it with as little foreknowledge as possible; in this case, all I knew about The Book of Strange New Things was that it was science fiction.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Originally published: 2014
Acquired: December 2025
Read: April 2026

This is definitely one of those sf books written by a "literary" author, as opposed to a "genre" author, yet it also seemed to me that it was in dialogue with the genre of science fiction, specifically that subgenre of science fiction about missionaries going to alien planets: James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Dan Simmons's Hyperion (1989), and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996). Unlike those, though, the protagonist of this book, Peter Leigh, is not Catholic—he's a convert to Protestantism and a married one at that. I thought this was interesting, because all of those predecessor books I can think of are not only about Catholics, but specifically Jesuits, one of the most intellectual of the Catholic traditions. Peter comes at his faith from a very different direction, with the emotional fervency of the late-life convert (very much not, in my experience, a Catholic trope). His love for Jesus is bound up in his love for his wife. It's a different perspective on faith than I'm used to (as an atheist that grew up Catholic), and I found it interesting—sometimes Peter and his wife are so damn earnest I found them annoying, but never not real.

Like a lot of fiction, it's also about what Elaine Scarry calls "the difficulty of imagining other people": Peter struggles to empathize with his wife, and his wife struggles to empathize with him, over such a long distance, and in such different contexts. And this difficulty is also what's driving a social collapse on Earth, which felt all too real. 

I found the book kind of nerve-wracking, in that everything in it is vaguely off-putting—the environment Peter finds himself in, the actions of the people on the settlement, the enthusiasm of the aliens for Christ, Peter's own decision-making. You know bad things are coming, but are completely sucked along in it. The final reveal about what the aliens are interested in is very well done.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: August 2026

Pick of the month: Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik. It was a little bit of a struggle to pick a winner this month, because I don't think I really read any standout books, and indeed, a number of the books I read were not very good at all, alas. But Crucible of Gold is another solid installment in the Temeraire series, with some excellent parts.

All books read:

1. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
2. Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid
3. The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 by David Carpenter
4. Star Trek: Vanguard: Declassified by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore, Marco Palmieri, and David Mack
5. Sex, Lies and Private Eyes edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr
6. Victoria’s Secret: Her Life by Lida Bell Lunt
7. Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung by Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung, et al. 
8. Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke
9. The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
10. Crucible of Gold: Book Seven of Temeraire by Naomi Novik
11. Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 8 by Jim Shooter et al.

All books acquired:

1. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. JSA, Vol 3: Year One by Jeff Lemire and Gavin Guidry
3. DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al. 
4. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny 

 Currently reading:

• Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
• Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Star Trek: Vanguard: What Judgments Come by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore 
• DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al.
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
• The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages by Miri Rubin

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven by David Mack
2. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
3. The Poe Clan Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio 
4. On Progress in Physics and Subjectivity Theory: An Amateur’s Meanderings as Inspiration for Actual Physicists by N. Otre Le Vant 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 675 (down 1)

Steady progress! 

 

 

Vincent Shandor, Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century (1997)

Carpatho-Ukraine is a region bordering Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, populated by members of all those ethnicities, not to mention the Ruthenians. Over the years, it has been annexed and abandoned by various powers. I forget how I first heard about it, but back in 2013, I got interested in it and read Republic for a Day, a book by a British journalist who was present during its short-lived status as its own nation: after Czechoslovakia broke up in 1939, it declared itself an independent republic, but only days later, it was annexed by Nazi-backed Hungary. Several years later, I read The Lost Embassy, a novel that fictionalizes these events.

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century: A Political and Legal History by Vincent Shandor

Published: 1997
Read: March 2026

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century is a more serious work than both of those, the work of a leading scholar of Carpatho-Ukraine who was a key figure in local politics during the 1930s. The book is published by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, and thus very much aimed at scholars—if you're looking at a book providing a general, accessible history of the region, this is not it, nor does it intend to be it. Shandor assumes you know a lot! Unfortunately, an accessible history of Carpatho-Ukraine has never been written in English as far as I can tell, so this is what you've got to work with.

I found that Shandor is one of those scholars who gives you a lot of details, but it's sometimes hard to extract the narrative. Occasionally, he's obviously trying to settle scores against other people from the time of the events he chronicles—still, this clearly comes from a place of deep passion for the region and its people, and that resonates through its pages.

This gives the kind of context and scope you just don't get from Republic for a Day. I finished the book with a much clearer understanding of how Carpatho-Ukraine related to the other countries around it, and how it got tangled up in their political games and false promises.

Note that the book's title claims to cover "the twentieth century," but it really pretty much stops at 1945, I think because that's when Carpatho-Ukraine was absorbed into the USSR, and Shandor (I am pretty sure) was never able to go back after that. The book was published in 1997, but he lived until 2003; I hope he was able to reconnect with his homeland. 

The Internet Is Dying

You may be familiar with "Dead Internet Theory," which states that "activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents" and that "[m]any of the accounts that engage with such content also appear to be managed by artificial intelligence agents."

I don't know if the Internet actually is dead yet, but it certainly seems to be dying. Facebook is always pushing pages on me when I just want to see what my friends are up to; a lot of those are clearly AI-written prose. But even some of my friends who should know better often share AI-written posts!

image courtesy Stackery

Reddit, however, is even worse. So many subs have, of late, been taken over by bots that post LLM-generated content. The problem I have run into is that many posters don't seem to recognize this—these posts often get a ton of engagement and upvotes. I am pretty good at recognizing it, because of course I read hundred of pages of LLM-generated prose every semester. But a stranger on the Internet only has my word for it. Though one of the things I am coming to learn from all of this is that I think people who are bad at reading don't understand that other people can actually be good at it.

I wouldn't say I am perfect at it, but I am pretty well calibrated. I usually check by using Pangram; Pangram claims to have a false-positive rate below 1%. Of course they're incentivized to say that, but if you poke around on Google Scholar, the trend of independent analyses of Pangram seems to put the false-positive rate below 3%. But even if you link people to the Pangram result, they'll still be all, "But how do you know?" There are some bad LLM detectors out there which have given the good ones a bad rap. (And, in any case, I suspect most of the Ai DeTeCtOrS aRe So UnReLiAbLe people are probably the ones themselves using LLMs to write.)

It's infuriating to me that I have to deal with this on Reddit, because if I want to read crappy LLM-generated prose, I can just do it at work! Reddit is supposedly where I go to relax and have fun. On the other hand, there is a bit of satisfaction I get from getting a post deleted—I am certainly the number one bot hunter on a couple of subs.

I am getting better at making my case, though. The key is often to be able to link to a pattern of behavior—and this is also the key to understand what's going on, because that's probably the question I get the most. What is a bot's incentive to post a heartwarming parenting story on Daddit or a broadly worded book recommendation request on r/printSF? As the Conversation article I linked to above says, "This creates a vicious cycle of artificial engagement, one that has no clear agenda and no longer involves humans at all." That article discusses propaganda, but there are other reasons at play when it comes to the Dead Internet.

At least when it comes to Reddit, it's about slipping in product recommendations. Take this user, for example. Aside from all being LLM-generated the posts are pretty innocuous, but read every single one of them, and a pattern begins to emerge:

• A post in r/PostConcussion is supposedly about memory issues but links to an online concussion test they took.
• A post in r/eldercare is about their parent getting scammed by AI, and includes a link to a for-profit service that helps people get their money back. 
• A post in r/Entrepreneurs is supposedly about getting recommendations on how to fight fake reviews, and links to one specific service that will help. 
• A post in r/PaintByNumbers asks if other posters have painted places they want to go to, but slips in a mention of a specific kit from a specific company. 
• A post in r/family supposedly asks for advice about telling her sister she could have bought her engagement ring for $6,000 less online, and makes sure to mention the site. 

Note that of these five, three include a link, though two do not. 

(These bots make it tricky by hiding their posting history, but you can usually find the posts via Google, or the very helpful Arctic Shift tool. Arctic Shift reveals another one by this poster that got deleted on r/OldHomeRepair, where the poster asks about a quote they got for modernization.)

Obviously links help SEO, but what's up with the nonlinked posts? And some are even critical of the services mentioned, like the one on r/OldHomeRepair?

The answer turns out to be... other LLMs! There's a good 404 Media article on it (here's a link to an archived version, because it's paywalled). Lots of people ask LLMs for product recommendations these days. What's the best place for people to get production recommendations? Well, Reddit, because it is of course a compilation of real human experiences! Reddit posts get scraped and searched by LLMs and absorbed into their training data. So if you ask ChatGPT to recommend good paint-by-number kits, it's going to recommend one that lots of people on Reddit mentioned that they liked!

The posts that don't mention products, in between them, are to build up karma—hence heartwarming and/or ragebait stories on Daddit, for example. In fact, I've observed a pattern: often the bots build up comment karma with short, random comments in popular subs, then move on to making posts to farm karma, then move on to product recs.

Of course there's a tragedy-of-the-commons problem here. If everyone markets their products on Reddit via bots, then Reddit will cease to be the repository of real human recommendations that made the bots want to post there to begin with.

Although... I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that real human experience is what people want, anyway. Isn't it just easier to talk to bots? Maybe it's not the Internet that's dying, but the whole human social experience.