A guest edition by Michael Salu, for
Writer's Mosaic, a new literary platform supported by the Royal Literary Fund. Inspired by an essay by Italo Calvino, this guest edition, with a host of writers and thinkers bring fiction, essay, and art together to think about authorship, computation, and the continuation and evolution of myth and story.
In Italo Calvino's 1967 essay Cybernetics and Ghosts, he riffs on the origin and evolution of language and offers us the speculative provocation that writing and human authorship might, one day, become a computationally reducible process.
This edition, edited and curated by Michael Salu, features four works of fiction, three essays, and some exploratory artworks, with wonderfully erudite contributions from Iphgenia Baal, Abeba Birhane, Tice Cin, Irenosen Okojie, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Sara Saab which transport us through the angst-ridden tunnels of "cognitive capitalism", introduced by Salu's essay:
The Collective Storyteller, on engaging new syntheses of memory.
This edition will be followed by a full anthology. More soon.