Can poetry be sci-fi?

The one where I put the weird back in Weirdo Poetry

Hi Party People!

This is the book version of a haiku comic I first shared back in February. I revised the poem and redid the art. I will have a pre-order link for signed copies of Wild Divinity in the next week. All other versions of the book will go on sale on January 30, 2023.

Instead of an essay, today I have a weird series of haiku. I wrote most of these in 2018 for a project I never finished called, How the Machines Won.

It was going to be a collection of poems (mostly haiku) set in the future when AI had become sentient and enslaved the human race. The introduction would be a short story where a group of teens stumbles onto a cache of poems that explained how the world dominated by humans came to be overthrown.

For obvious reasons, this old project has been on my mind again. Here are a few of the haiku I wrote. I’d love to know if you would have any interest in reading a weird book with more of this kind of poetry.

our alarm clocks
were the vanguard of the coming
robot uprising

phone alerts, we would
learn were the Trojan horse of
the singularity

the true miracle
was how much machines did with
clumsy human tools

the robots taught us
immortality’s price was
human agency

after the machines
rose up, “people watching” took
a sinister turn

we told the machines
all of our weaknesses on
social media

gamification
only a euphemism
for reprogramming

machines take over
but humans not obsolete
rage is a fuel source

resistance kneecapped
machine learning co-opted
the teenagers first

pursuit of profits
enabled rise of machines
sped our extinction

our machine learning
created algorithms
with our biases

algorithms can’t
maximize or optimize
human contentment

What do you think? Should I pursue this project? Would you buy a whole book of this kind of thing? Let me know!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason