Ian Martin
At 50, Ian Martin gave up construction work because of failing eyesight and took to writing. In the past 25 years he has self-published five novels and now regularly posts commentary and opinion pieces on his blog, https://ianmartininpearlybeach.blogspot.com/ and on Substack https://ianmartin.substack.com/
Articles By This Author
The Smarties solution
Let’s face it: growing old is a miserable story. Take for example one old toppie who thinks he has it all planned out. At the
A conversation with AI: I’m unusually broad and fast; humans can be deep and wise
Are you more knowledgeable than any human? Not in the way a human is. I can access and synthesize a much broader range of information
Habituation: the toddler in the razor wire
It must be about 40 years ago now that I read the short story by Nadine Gordimer in which a toddler gets trapped in the razor wire surrounding his parents’ upmarket Johannesburg home.
Just another simulacrum
What has the plight of the rhinoceros got to do with Jean Baudrillard?
Got to have the books, you know
“Why are you hoarding all these books?” This is what the millennial asked us, and he wasn’t the first to question our attachment to hard-copy reference material.
Idlers
It is 2035. I am 28, and in the past decade I’ve lived through a sea change that seems far from over. It has largely been driven by the development of AI. In 2026 I enrolled at UCT, intending to take a degree in Sociology, but after a week I saw that the subject was already five years behind the world I was experiencing, so I switched to a B.Com. Again, it took just a week for me to realise that we were being taught old economics. To while away the rest of the year, I switched to a BA majoring in English and Philosophy.
Paradoxical materialism
“The stinking rich will always be with us,” I said. “It’s in the Bible.”
Overtaken by Tech
It was voice simulation that did it. He retired in 2006 at the age of 60, and I quit the rat race in 2010, also