Tom Comitta
Tom Comitta is the author of two previous novels, The Nature Book and Patchwork, and 〇, Airport Novella, and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014, a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. Their short fiction and essays have appeared in Wired, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bomb.
With their new book, People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has written what may become the definitive time capsule of our debased American literary minds. Both novels were written with an assist from large language models (LLMs), but the latter—which we’ve chosen to excerpt here—serves as a warning tale from AI about how not to write.
Darwin discovered that evolution proceeds with neither direction nor purpose. The natural world is largely indifferent to plan or plot. Yet we, story-seeking creatures that we are, see the world around us as more completed, more accomplished, than what came before. Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book explores these tensions by stitching together hundreds of fragments in the history of literary writing about the natural world—this excerpt alone is a collage of ninety-seven novels ranging from Hawthorne to Arundhati Roy. Though the text of The Nature Book is a polyphonic effort of writers, humans are absent from the actual story. In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.