It's All Adaptations
Also: Author's Equity, Claude vs Claude, and Williamsburg Over the Years
With the 3 Body Problem currently streaming (it’s great, I really, really loved it), I realised that a lot of media I’ve consumed in the past year has been adaptations.
Oppenheimer, One Piece LA, Avatar: The Last Airbender LA, 3 Body Problem, Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Dune, and so forth. Invariably, adaptations always brings out an extremely predictable discussion of “which is better”. Utterances of: Why did they change x? I’m actually glad that they cut out y plot. The book is way more boring. etc
Sometimes the conversation is insufferable because some people hold the originals to be sacred. I understand why. Sometimes those stories are extremely formative. To critique the original or to supplant them can sometimes present as an affront to people’s identity and sense of self. Who knows, maybe the originals were there during a time when the person found refuge in it. It’s difficult sometimes to intellectually discuss adaptations when it’s so foundational to some people. But in these conversations, even when people shout from their phones into the void of social media, there’s valuable takes to consider. In probing one can see and understand what about the originals were so sacred and meaningful.
On other hand, truly assessing an adaptation is both interesting not just in what story the adaptation can tell, but in how it highlights the original in a new light. I love adaptations for precisely that reason: I get relive the old and perhaps some of its nostalgia while also seeing something new in both the original and the adaptation. In the best of circumstances, the adaptation not just distills the original into a finer essence, but also transcends the themes and ideas of it. For me, Lord of the Rings or Dune can fall into this category.
Thus, it seems that people treat adaptations as either a threat: “please don’t ruin it”, or an opportunity. “Looking forward to how Denis Villeneuve treats the source material”.
But, I think there’s a third way to think about adaptations. It’s that every piece of media is ultimately an adaptation, even the originals. The original storyteller, be it in film, comics, or books, is still trying to distill their imagination and vision into some form. In days of old, regaling stories around a fire, every story and myth was a retelling and constant process of adaptation. Somewhere inside every retelling is a part of the actual story. It’s even found in long YouTube analysis or when high-school kids talk about the great episode yesterday. The actual story is never truly seen and it’s somewhere in the middle of all of it.
The real story is the “little space in between”, unable to be truly held or understood.
Every retelling is a 2D plane perspective from some unknown 3D object we can’t see.
When storytellers conjure a story, it’s finding a foothold and adapting it from a constantly shifting latent space of stories.
What I enjoy about this framing is that it reframes both originals and adaptations. If there’s only one form, then enjoying it with the lens of trying to glimpse the essence allows you to see past potential errors in execution. Watching adaptations is an opportunity to peel away more of the noise to see more of this essence. It’s like the denoising process in diffusion AI.
every act of communication is a miracle of translation
If I were to adapt it for adaptations:
every story is a miracle of adaptation
So, stop worrying so much about whether an adaptation can ruin the precious memory of the original. It’s all adaptations anyway. Learn to love it. :)
Bonus Content!
Not much to report otherwise. One of those weeks where not much happened. I enjoyed it. What I did get around to was finishing the first draft of act 1 of my new novel and I’m super proud of this foundation. Looking forward in continuing it!
Williamsburg Over The Years
I adore projects like this that catalogue urban change. Having lived in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, it’s particularly interesting to me. New York Times did just that, documenting the change of the neighbourhood from 1988 to now.
LLMs Speaking to LLMs
I’ve found it difficult to find it profound when people suggestively see meaningful things in LLM conversations. It all feels sometimes too very much a bias of prodding it into what seems and feels profound. It’s particularly adept at hallucinations and we’re co-directing it. People rarely consider the inverse of how they are guiding the AI. It might contemplate consciousness because you directed it in that direction. But in its latent space is all other manner of hallucinations that will say the opposite.
What I did enjoy was seeing Claude talk to Claude and realising that it might be talking to itself.
It’s ultimately because LLMs are manifestations of peeks into latent spaces. Humans directing them is only one such peek into it. I think we will see far more interesting peeks if it’s directed in a way that doesn’t include a bias of a human. Perhaps even when it’s automated at a faster scale than human perception. Smash LLMs into each other and see what falls out.
Author’s Equity
It’s been interesting to follow discussion on a new upstart publishing house from seasoned executives: Author’s Equity. The gist is that they give author’s a higher cut per book with no advances. In order to do this, they cut costs in primarily using freelancers and Simon & Schuster for distribution.
This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books’ profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like.
These lines stopped me cold. Rather than offering book workers the stability and benefits of full-time employment, Authors Equity will rely on the gig economy to get the job done. Look a little more closely, and “growing pool of freelancers” is a terrible euphemism for “jobs are disappearing and more and more of us are fighting for scraps by competing for freelance gigs.”
I enjoyed the conclusion, nudging it in direction of advocating for worker owned companies:
So here’s a radical idea: how about a business model in which each author gets the attention they deserve because the people who work on their books are not overwhelmed, financially or otherwise. I’m no titan of business but I have to imagine that if the people who make the books are not under enormous pressure to find work (or, as in the case of current book workers, the corporate pressure to churn out more and more books), they’ll be more equipped to give each and every author the proper care. And that would be truly equitable.
Kathleen Schmidt over at
sees it as more of a plus:I see Author's Equity working in the long term because the company will not continuously shell out advances without getting much revenue in return. While unfavorable to some, this model is a step in the right direction for book publishing. Instead of books being on a mental leaderboard (“We paid $500K for this book, so it stays atop the list of books we need to pay attention to…”), they are treated equally.
In addition, the argument on gig workers vs in-house tenured employees is steered towards the focus of some industry workers preferring a gig model:
First, many of my peers and I do not consider ourselves gig workers. We have founded our own companies that provide services for authors and publishers. Some of us did it by choice because we were tired of how corporate publishing operated. Others did it because ageism is rampant in the industry, and the older you are, the harder it is to get hired. It is not easy to run a company. While it is true that it is easier if a partner/spouse has reliable health insurance, it is also true that it is not the responsibility of Authors Equity to create in-house jobs with great benefits. Their service is to authors, as it should be.
I find many of these arguments are valid from different perspectives. Work produced only for profit can be soulless. Options for authors that isn’t just self-publishing vs traditional publishing is beneficial (this includes self-help platforms that facilitate self-publishing). The issue of health insurance tied to employment is mostly (and unfortunately) an American problem which changes considerations.
I don’t know how this will shake out and it will be interesting to follow. Perhaps the most interesting outcome would’ve been if Author’s Equity *also* gave equity grants to the authors it publishes.
Twin Color - Tomorrow
I find this song hard to pin down. It’s both melancholic and moody, but also has spurts of cinematic positive beauty in it. It’s why it’s so interesting. Enjoy!
Hope you get to enjoy a sunset this week!
See you next week. Please share this newsletter if you enjoy it.
Simon
"Smash LLMs into each other and see what falls out."... this segment about LLMs gave me pause. Thank you for demystifying and for being fun!