For the July Meeting, we will look at early work of H G Wells.
In Person: 6:30 Minor Works Building, Wednesday 16th July
Visionary writer HG Wells (1866-1946) was both a wonderful storyteller as well as masterful at including his significant scientific knowledge and curiosity into his stories. While he is best known for his SF, he was a hugely prolific writer across wide areas of fiction and non-fiction.
Much like Jules Verne before him, he was ahead of his time, with many of his imaginings proving to be on track (pre-emptive descriptions of aeroplanes, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb, satellite television and the internet can be found in his works).
For the Critical Mass:
Read the 2 short stories below for group discussion
Nikka VanRy published a list of 100 Must-Read SF novels by female writers at Bookriot. hear are the first 20 in her list: 1. Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce 2. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia 3. Among Others by Jo Walton 4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie 5. Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam 6. The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich 7. Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey 8. Ash by Malinda Lo 9. Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb 10. The Pyramid Waltz by Barbara Wright 11. Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee 12. The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish 13. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter 14. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest 15. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson 16. Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara 17. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh 18. Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto 19. Cinder by Marissa Meyer 20. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart … see the link above for the rest of the list.
For the August meeting, please select one from the hundred you would like to talk about. Or, if you think there’s a work that they’ve overlooked, tell us about it.
In 1933, the most famous of H.G. Wells movies arrived with The Invisible Man. Director James Whale (Frankenstein) turned the novel into a harrowing science fiction horror story about a man who turns himself invisible with no way to undo it, and is driven mad. The quality of the effects and visuals for a film about an invisible character made in 1933 is remarkable and earned the film praise from numerous publications, not only for the originality of the story and quality of the acting, but also the effects employed throughout the film.
Dr. Jack Griffin, played by Claude Rains, quickly moves from harmless pranks to senseless murder in this thrilling piece of cinematic history. This remains one of the most violent of all the classic Universal Horror Monster movies, as Jack Griffin has a higher kill count than almost any villain in horror cinema history, with over 105 kills (thanks to the train derailment). While it often falls behind Dracula and Frankenstein in conversations, this H.G. Wells movie holds its own and remains a masterpiece of horror cinema almost 100 years later.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation announced its shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction: a $25,000 cash award given each year to a work of fiction that best reflects ideas central to Le Guin’s work.
Here are the eight finalists selected by the foundation after a public nomination process:
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom Publishing)
Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston (Tordotcom Publishing)
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson (Saga Press)
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (Feminist Press)
The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (Tordotcom Publishing)
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom Publishing)
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher (Neon Hemlock)
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins (Sourcebooks Landmark)
Melbourne SF pub meetup. Second Wednesday of every month
Next meetup: Wednesday 9 July.
The second Wednesday pub meeting open to all Melbourne fans of SF, fantasy, and horror, announces a change of venue. The time is the same, 6pm every second Wednesday. It was the Nixon Hotel, in Docklands. Now in Melbourne Central, 9 July 2025, 6pm. Lion Hotel, Level 3, Melbourne Central, 211 La Trobe St. It’s the big sports bar. Happy Hour is 4pm to 7pm, i.e. 3 hours duration.The shift is temporary, something to do with AFL and quiz nights. Perhaps it’s AFL or quiz nights.
Nova Mob members, friends, and guests borged into Meta’s AI
Roll a dice to choose the next word to build a sentence. Keep doing that 50 times to build a paragraph or page. What are the chances that you will accurately reproduce a section of a Harry Potter novel? About 98%, if you are one particular AI model. But before naming that Artificial Intelligence model, and which novels are uncannily reproduced with no money going back to the writer, how do books get into the AI training set in the first place? If you are Meta, you use a database of pirated books and hoover it all up in its entirety, according to The Atlantic. Just like the Borg on Star Trek. Turns out almost all the Nova Mob’s published members, friends, and our guests, are part of the borged data set that Meta ate for its training set. Did LibGen have permission to reproduce the books of these writers? Did Meta have permission to borg them up into its maw, to train its AI with? Search for yourself:
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
“Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the LibGen collection’s current iteration.” Including novels, stories, and non-fiction by all these people, I’ve checked:
Eugen Bacon, Max Barry, John Birmingham, Jenny Blackford, Russell Blackford, Sue Bursztynski, James Cambias, Trudi Canavan, Paul Collins Jack Dann, Chris Flynn Rob Gerrand, Kerry Greenwood Lee Harding, Richard Harland, Robert Hood Van Ikin, George Ivanoff Paul Kincaid Vanessa Len, Ken Liu Sophie Masson, Bren MacDibble, Iain McIntyre, Sean McMullen, Andrew MacRae, Farah Mendlesohn, Meg Mundell Shelley Parker-Chan, Hoa Pham, Gillian Polack Jane Routley, Lucy Sussex Shaun Tan, Keith Taylor Kaaron Warren, Janeen Webb
AI, plagiarism, and Harry Potter – as reported on Ars Technica
“Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book
The research could have big implications for generative AI copyright lawsuits.”
“In its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories. In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behaviour” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”
“But is it actually a fringe behaviour? And have leading AI companies addressed it? New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights into this question.”
A May 2025 paper from Cornell, Stanford, and West Virginia University legal scholars and computer scientists investigated whether five AI models could reproduce text from Books3, a repository which is often used to train AI models and includes many works still under copyright.
I found it fascinating how tokens work. Timothy Lee’s article on Ars Technica – from which I’ve quoted here – describes how it’s done, using the example “peanut butter and.. “ where the next word could be jelly, sugar, cream, other. Each next word has a probability. The maths is applied to that, and in a 50 tokens example it’s a string of probabilities that multiply together (such as 0.83 x 0.32 x 0.27 x 0.56 and so on). Think of each number as a token, and each probability is the chance of selecting the right word. The equation is 50 numbers long.
“The study authors took 36 books and divided each of them into overlapping 100-token passages. Using the first 50 tokens as a prompt, they calculated the probability that the next 50 tokens would be identical to the original passage. They counted a passage as “memorised” if the model had a greater than 50 percent chance of reproducing it word for word.
This definition is quite strict. For a 50-token sequence to have a probability greater than 50 percent, the average [value for each] token in the passage needs [to be] a probability of at least 98 percent!”
One of the 36 books tested was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US title).
“The chart [see the article] shows how easy it is to get a model to generate 50-token excerpts from various parts of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The darker a line is, the easier it is to reproduce that portion of the book.
“Llama 3.1 70B—a mid-sized model Meta released in July 2024—is far more likely to reproduce Harry Potter text than any of the other four models.
“Specifically, the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorised 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time.
As one commenter said, “If I could be prompted with a paragraph from a book and give the next paragraph verbatim I think you would agree I had effectively memorised large swaths of the thing, why should an LLM be held to a different standard than a human? And again as the article states, if the standard had been relaxed to missing a few tokens (akin to getting a few words or punctuation wrong here and there) it likely would be a lot higher.”
Interestingly, best-sellers had more likelihood for being predictively reiterated verbatim by the AI – OK, let’s call it for what it is: reproduced – , than did work by less popular writers.
This is one of the best studies to unpack exactly how much has been stolen by the tech giants. It used to be that downloading a mp3 file illegally could get you a US $70,000 fine. What should Meta expect for stealing copyrighted works on an industrial scale?
This is why the Authors’ Societies have court cases under way.
“Date: Tue 1 July 2025 – 12:00 AM to Thu 9 October 2025 – 12:00 AM
With: Hoa Pham
Summary: Join a supportive community of fantasy writers and hone your craft under the guidance of award-winning author and editor Hoa Pham.”
💥 💥 💥
SF Commentary #120 arrives
This is a really well written and presented issue. The first part is devoted to Race Mathews, and for that alone it is a worthy magazine of record. Includes farewells from Iola Mathews and Gareth Evans, as well as letters of comment from those who attended the State Memorial Service for Race. Recommended.
Available from Bruce Gillespie, physical and email addresses and details at e-fanzines.com
Friends, out-of-town guests, and new arrivals – you are always welcome and have an open invitation to the Mob’s face-to-face and Zoom meetings. First time arrivals – free. Otherwise a $5 donation for expenses please. Face-to-face meetings are at the Kensington Town Hall:
Face to face, the Kensington Town Hall has ample parking and excellent disability access. Kensington Railway Station is 13 minutes travel from Flinders St Station on the Craigieburn line.
Hi Nova Mob members and friends – Nova Mob next meets on Wednesday July 2nd July’s Nova Mob is a discussion and appreciation by Nova Mob members Perry Middlemiss and Chong of the novels of Tasmania’s award-winning author Robbie Arnott. Arnott’s novel The Rain Heron has come up already in Nova Mob discussions as being a stunning piece of work, although if you’re not familiar with Arnott’s novels, Perry says the third novel, Limberlost, is a good place to start. Arnott was first published by Text Publishing, and Chong, their cover designer, will be speaking to the design and art aspects of Arnott’s publications. Perry’s discussing the texts between the covers. Overlap will occur.
We will be meeting at the Presentation Room of the Kensington Town Hall. Before the Hall had its makeover it was known as the Conference Room. It’s the big room to the left at the top of the stairs. The usual Zoom webcasting meeting will be happening.
Robbie Arnott (born 1989) is an Australian author known for his four novels to date, Flames, The Rain Heron, Limberlost, and Dusk. All of which have been nominated for prestigious Australian literary awards and have a sterling track record of winning them.
By Zoom – simulcast
You are invited to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Please join us on-line!
Wednesday 2 July 2025
8.00pm – 9.30 pm Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney time 7.30pm – 9.00pm Adelaide time 6.30pm – 8.00 pm Darwin time 5.00pm – 6.30 pm Perth time 9.00am – 10.30am London time 1.00am – 2.30am PST the night before
There’s a five-episode Doctor Who spinoff coming to Disney+ called The War Between the Land and the Sea, and Disney+ released a trailer today that suggests that the battle will be epic.
Here’s the official synopsis:
When a fearsome and ancient species emerges from the ocean, dramatically revealing themselves to humanity, an international crisis is triggered. With the entire population at risk, UNIT step into action as the land and sea wage war.
Guardian critic Lisa Tuttle’s new “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” covers Awakened by Laura Elliott (Angry Robot, £9.99), Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab (Tor, £22), Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang (Canelo, £14.99), Esperance by Adam Oyebanji (Arcadia, £10.99), and The Quiet by Barnaby Martin (Pan Macmillan, £16.99).
Adrian will be our guest speaker (via Zoom) at Critical Mass on June 18th, where he will be interviewed by Alexandra Pierce, editor of Speculative Insight.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has two novels, Alien Clay and Service Model, as finalists in this years Hugo awards, as well as being nominated as best series finalist for his Tyrant Philosophers series.
He has also received the Arthur C Clark Award for Shroud.
Critical Mass will meet at 6:30pm on Wednesday, June 18th at the Minor Works Building, 22 Stamford Court, Adelaide. Doors open at 6:20pm [If you enter from Sturt Street, there’s an open path between 50 and 52 Sturt Street leading to the community centre] For those who can’t make it in person, they’re welcome to join us via zoom
Zoom details:
Topic: Critical Mass, Adelaide Time: Jun 18, 2025 6:30pm Adelaide, 7pm Melbourne, 10am London
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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