Charles Mitchell rips into a wild theory in a new book: how a clash of cultures lands between comfortable tradition and mystifying new science.
Mitchell’s “The God Song: Artificial Intelligence Meets American Appalachia” spans 153 pages in a novel exploring fringe elements attempting to lure children with music.
“The Southwest Virginia and Eastern Tennessee region has been, for the past 30 years, a welcome refuge from the Washington, D.C., bubble,” said Mitchell, who lives near Washington at McLean, Virginia.
Mitchell travels through the Mountain Empire region and has since studied its people and places — hence this novel.
This book comes from years of exploring what Mitchell calls “the growing influence of artificial intelligence on music creation and how that music might raise questions across a range of social norms.”
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The book, in turn, takes readers to a fictitious music venue in the Clinch Mountains, where “the book allows the reader to see the impact and consequences” of artificial intelligence, Mitchell said.
And here, Mitchell said, readers meet characters that the author calls “some good, some bad and some confused.”
In all, it’s a wild ride, full of twists and turns — all, oh, so refreshingly familiar to folks around the Mountain Empire region.
