A Promise

What I owe the stories I examine, and the people who read this publication.

During this AI revolution, nobody quite knows who or what to trust anymore. So I want to make a few promises about this publication.

The primary purpose of this Substack is not literary prose. I care about writing well, but the thing I am actually interested in is the hidden machinery of story.

I believe Stories are one of the fundamental ways human beings make sense of the world. They therefore deserve to be treated with respect.

So:

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I. I will always strive for accuracy.

If I make a factual claim about a work, its production, history or its creators, I will make every reasonable effort to get it right.

II. I will distinguish evidence from interpretation.

You should always be able to tell when I’m describing something the work demonstrably does, when I’m offering interpretation of it, and when I’m simply giving you my opinion. Those are different kinds of claims and i intend to treat them as such.

III. I will never manufacture certainty.

Some things can be demonstrated, while some can only be argued. Others remain ambiguous. Ambiguity will not be treated as a problem that needs to be hidden.

IV. I will treat fictional worlds on their own terms.

My analysis begins inside the world being examined.
I will not take a fashionable philosophical, political or psychological framework and force a story to become an example of it. External ideas can illuminate a work, but the work itself gets the first word.
Its mythology, history and internal logic matters. The intentions and preoccupations of its creators matter. Before asking what I can say through a story, I want to understand what the story itself is saying.

V. I will not distort a work to protect an argument.

If the evidence contradicts my theory, the theory will adapt. A good interpretation should explain more of the work, not require inconvenient parts of it to disappear.

VI. Every serious analysis published here will go through the same underlying process.

That means reconstruction, comparison, contradiction testing, structural analysis, symbolic analysis and repeated attempts to falsify the emerging model.

The finished essay may read simple. The work underneath it usually is not.

VII. I promise that the analysis itself will be original.

There may be other people who have noticed individual pieces of what I write about. There usually are. Stories have millions of readers, viewers and players.

What I promise is that the models, arguments and connections presented here are the result of my own investigation rather than the repackaging of somebody else’s analysis.

VIII. I will correct myself.

If I discover that something I published is materially wrong, I would rather change the article than defend the mistake.

Accuracy matters more to me than winning an argument with my past self.

IX. AI will remain a tool, never an authority.

I work with LLMs. Through my work in physics and tech i remain deeply interested in the technology. Pretending otherwise would make this entire statement pointless.
But a sophisticated language generator does not get to decide what I believe, what an artwork means, or whether an argument survives scrutiny.

I build interpretive frameworks. I don’t outsource interpretation to stochastic parrots.
The judgment and responsibility for what appears under my name will remain mine.

X. I will take these worlds seriously.

That does not mean treating every story as profound. Sometimes the honest conclusion will be that something is incoherent, shallow, compromised or simply broken. Taking a work seriously means giving it the chance to demonstrate what it actually is before deciding what to think about it.

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And this place will grow.

There are hundreds of fictional universes I want to explore: enormous ones, forgotten ones, brilliant ones, broken ones, and occasionally ones that appear simple until you start pulling at the machinery underneath them.

Each deserves its own investigation. Each deserves to be heard in its own voice.

I want this to become a place where you can trust that whatever world we enter, I have done the work required to meet it honestly.

That is my promise to you.