Amazon just messaged me that my latest Kindle title was now available. “Morning Man” is a 6,300-word short story with an interesting history. It’s about an AI DJ at a small farm-town AM radio station in Wisconsin. I wrote it in 1989. I never tried to sell it, but just threw it in a box full of old manuscripts, where it sat for the next 35 years or so.
Why didn’t I try to sell it? I couldn’t make the characters work. I’ve always been good with gadgets and world-building. Characters, well, I did my best, but the people in the story just didn’t sound especially real. Part of the problem may have been the fact that in 1989 we were preparing to launch PC Techniques and move to Arizona from Scotts Valley, California. My time and energy mostly went into that megaproject. By the time I retired in the teens and returned to fiction, I had mostly forgotten the story of Rusty the AI and his bewildered owner.
So I pulled it out, read it a few times, and rewrote it heavily. Now, having five novels and a couple of intense workshops behind me, I knew what I was doing. The characters now work. And you can have your own copy for 99c.
Well, AI DJs on broadcast radio are now real, and becoming common. Here’s one piece on the state of things as of 2025. Rolling Stone has another good piece on the topic, but it’s paywalled. My brief scan showed a few more, and if the topic interests you, you can probably find plenty.
I don’t expect the general public to believe that I predicted AI DJs in 1989. Nonetheless, I did. So take a look and see what you think. Reviews and ratings are always welcome; thanks in advance. And as I’ve said here more than once, I gotta go dig around in that box and see what else I wrote and then forgot about!
How exciting, I’ve purchased a copy, I’ll thread it into my summer reading pile and then write a review.
73
I enjoyed the story. It sparked my interest in daytime only AM radio stations. There were a couple of daytime stations that I regularly listened to when I lived in Utah. According to search results, daytime AM radio stations still exists, but their numbers are declining.
When we lived in Rochester NY 1979-1985, the hospital where Carol worked was on my way home from the Xerox campus, so I dropped her off in the morning and picked her up after 5. My little 1975 Honda Civic didn’t have FM radio, so we listened to an AM station that signed off after 5 PM. Jack Palvino (I think) was the DJ and Dick Tobias the newscaster. I listened to them while waiting for Carol to get off work, and sometimes I heard the station sign off. Funny how I don’t remember the station callsign at all. But that gave me the idea for the story, which I didn’t begin writing until we were long out of Rochester.