Editorial

Mythaxis is going through a period of transition.

Nothing to fear about that.

How are we changing? Let me count the ways:

One: non-fiction

Last issue we welcomed onboard our first longform fiction reviewer, the erudite Mattia Ravasi; this issue we throw the doors wide for our second, the redoubtable Bill Ryan! Both boast admirable track records of literary opinionation, and we look forward to watching them dispense their insights in turn for many issues to come. It might be considered a thrilling back-and-forth between titan warriors of the pen-not-sword, very much history’s slowest-paced duel, were it not for that fact that they are in no conflict with each other whatsoever.

So too we continue our other new feature, showcasing newly published fiction from an array of other spec-fic zines via a brief collection of shortform reviews, but now we also present our first interview. This is most likely to be an occasional rather than regular event, but perhaps all the more special for it.

Two: artificial intelli…yawn

No new lengthy update about our trials and tribulations with the Slushbot (see past editorials ad nauseum), because after carefully considering the results of our toils we’ve decided no more! We have provided a more serious write-up of that lengthy experiment here, but – after dancing with (and around) the subject of AI in publishing for more than a year – it’s at last time to clarify some points regarding this magazine’s editorial position.

In the past we’ve used algorithmic image generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney to illustrate the magazine; but, while their output can be undeniably beautiful, we won’t use them again for the foreseeable future. The blackbox approach of training these systems on the work of unknown others raises too many ethical red flags.

The emergence of a service that rewards the artists who helped it grow would certainly change our stance. We will wait for one while breathing.

When it comes to the likes of ChatGPT, we feel far less ambivalence. It is the editor’s opinion that algorithmic text generation is a poor substitute for human expression. It offers “the new” only in the most superficial of senses, and while large language models might accidentally happen upon striking combinations of words, by nature these are systems that instead of reaching great heights tend towards the average (and when it comes to prose, the very average).

We remain agnostic with regard to the use of LLMs to generate prompts or ideas, even entire plots – plenty of good stories are generic, and the creation of hallucinatory “facts” is hardly a calamity when it comes to making up stories. However, the final work should be the sole expression of a human mind.

As a culture, there must be some domains we preserve for ourselves. Art, because it is as much a pleasure to create as it is to experience, is one. We would be lessened if we outsourced such things to unthinking systems, as would art itself.

For these reasons, we are not interested in publishing stories created by machine, unless that machine is flesh-and-blood.

Three: compensation

It has been some time since we last took in new submissions, skipping our April window, but with good reason. Amongst our many plans for the future, one at least is imminent: starting in July, we will begin offering our contributors a princely 1 cent per word fee instead of a flat $20 per story. We’re going to switch from dollars to euros, but to balance that blow to the US economy we’re setting €20 as our new minimum fee as well.

We don’t think this means we’ll get a better class of submissions (we like the pieces we’ve taken in the past just fine), but we do think that writers deserve more than we’ve been offering them. This isn’t a profit-turning venture, and it isn’t trying (or ever likely) to be one, but we can justify this small increase in costs and keep afloat for the long term. So we will.

We held off making this change until all existing commitments to publish were satisfied – therefore, as of now, our fiction silos stand echoingly empty.

Mythaxis is desperately in need of stories!

Know any writers? Human ones? Let them know!