Spoiler warning: I spoil the plot of this 1950s pulp fiction novel early, often, and remorselessly.

I picked The Silver Eggheads off a shelf of battered paperback pulp fiction in the Glasgow branch of Oxfam Books. Like all good pulp fiction, the illustration on its cover is absurd and confusing. A flesh-coloured humanoid with simple socket holes for eyes and a mouth, two-pronged grabbers for hands, ball-joints for knees and elbows, and hemispherical breasts covered with the solitary piece of clothing: a white bra. Just next to that creature, a seemingly human man in a mid-century sort of lounge outfit and a sailors’s hat reaches across a metallic console of dials and gauges as if to grab the flesh bot. In the extreme foreground of the image, looming in from the left hand side of the frame, a glass balloon with suggestions of facial features that are once again socket holes skitters across the floor with thin metallic appendages that end in unheimlich four-fingered hands.

I opened this book for the first time a week and a half ago but it’s taken me a while to read it, even though it’s not very substantial. It’s been a busy week at work. In an all hands meeting, a leadership figure announced that at a summit of the C-suite it was decided that the company must be all in on AI or be left behind. That meant everybody was to immediately adopt the latest tools available in their day-to-day work. Hundreds of dollars in AI credits and days out of the work week would be made available for experimentation.

In this presentation and in others, enthusiastic employees filed to the front one at a time to give their testimony of how AI had changed their life. If there was any sweat on those brows, it surely had something to do with the efficiencies that were being found in the thus far salary-intensive business of writing code for software. The subtext of every demonstration is that this particular employee is ready to take on the role of overseer of virtual employees once most of the real ones have been shown the door.

The Silver Eggheads was first published in some form in 1958. Leiber wrote a sci-fi satire of the publishing industry that he saw becoming more commercial and hostile to the interests of the writer by the day. In his world, people stopped reading human authors long ago. Instead, the “writers” of the day are mere operators of wordmills, great big automata that have been trained on the history of human written culture up to that point. The wordmills, all owned by futuristic versions of familiar publishing houses like Random House and Harpers, have perfected the production of a narcotic kind of lukewarm literature that has been algorithmically tuned to go down smooth, never challenging or demanding concentration. This literature is called wordwooze.

The book’s events open with an anarchist movement striking the publishers and destroying all the wordmills and we spend the rest of the story following the exploits of the colourful figures (some human, some robot) at the helm of a couple of those publishing houses as they figure out what to do next. The key twist: one of the publishing houses has been sitting on a secret contingency plan for decades. A cadre of sexy nurses has been looking after a nursery of the preserved brains of pre-wordmill authors, which have have been harnessed and protected in silvery eggs to one day act like a doomsday seed vault, repopulating the media landscape with human creation. Still with me?

Contemporary reviewers seem to have figured Fritz was a typical sci-fi pulp author who wrote, with only one hand on the keyboard, of pleasure robots and the mechanics of machine sex. There’s plenty of that. But putting this book down today, it’s hard not to gesticulate wildly around at the Situation. We’re already a decade into algorithm anxiety, the sort that has Spotify’s playlists reducing your taste in music to an optimised curve in multi-dimensional space. The last phase had short-form video reduce the recipe for attention down to its potent intravenous base, a continuous flow of wordwooze that comes with eye strain, a crick in the next, and sheer pant-shitting existential dread after a good long session of scrolling. But now, we are finally at the phase where we can remove people from the wooze production so we can see if Fritz was onto anything in particular or whether this sci-fi imagining was as inevitable as self-driving carriages and man walking on the moon.

In the world of The Silver Eggheads, there are fewer writers and the people still bearing that name are machine operators. I nod along wisely and ask Claude Code to try again and not mute the unit tests this time. The stuff that the wordmills produce is all anybody ever reads nowadays. It’s not that the pre-wordmill stuff isn’t available. It’s just so outdated and unapproachable and weird, why would you bother? Instead, the mills seem to be cranking out (operative words) reams of titillating erotica for both robot and human audiences in much the same way that Grok and friends have begun to do for the goon squad who are quickly forsaking the comparatively dull and slow-flowing waters they used to goat around in together like priapic satyrs.

Later in the story, a series of kidnappings seem to be carried out by warring factions (not worth explaining) and in more than one instance it seems that the apparent kidnapping was just the elaborate submissive fantasy of a publishing executive. When the rescue party arrive, they are sent away as the sounds of whipping and glee come through the locked doors of the kidnapper’s lair. Much of the wondrous technological apparatus, it seems, has been constructed for the male libido. I say male because most of the female characters are sexy nurses, pleasure robots, or in one case a prudish censor robot who finds love in a flurry of couplings on the final page that wouldn’t be out of place at the end of an Elizabethan farce. Scroll through the images generated by any popular AI model today though and you’ll see little has changed in what the AI has in mind for the ladies.

So what about the eponymous eggheads, that have been preserved by a prophetic scientist a sort of low-background-radiation training data set? They are finally put to use in an inaugural writing competition but unfortunately the work they produce has too much of themselves in it. It’s too individual, too transparently a projection of their writerly egos. There is one standout winner, but it turns out to have been written by one of the nurses. Not to worry though, by the final pages the publishers have landed on various solutions that involve robot writers with sufficient experience living among the humans to write for them without inserting difficult human egos into the work. Robot writers for robot readers has existed for some time, you see. In the other tab I scroll through Moltbook, ostensibly a message board for autonomous agents to shoot the breeze.