It’s been just over a week since the state of Hawaii was struck by one of the deadliest wildfire disasters in the history of the United States, with approximately 106 lives having been claimed at the time of writing; a number that’s almost certain to rise as time goes on. Indeed, now more than ever, our collective faith in humanity needs to manifest in an impactful way as rescue and relief efforts continue.
But, unfortunately, the wildfires have also acted as a backdrop for a development that shatters that same faith in one fell swoop, namely the publication of Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire and its Implications for Climate Change.
The book, whose author is credited as one Dr. Miles Stones, claims to be a firsthand account of those who lived through the wildfires, those who fought back against the flames, and how we can prevent disasters like this from ever happening again.
The book also claims to chronicle the events that took place from Aug. 8 — the day the wildfires began — to Aug. 11, despite the book’s publication date being listed as Aug. 10; believe it or not, it only gets fishier from there.
A further look at Stones’ author page on Amazon.com yields a number of suspicious, uncanny titles, most of them claiming to be life stories of such figures as Nicholas Sparks, Hunter Biden, Nora Roberts, and Shannen Doherty, just to name a few. Each of these books — like Fire and Fury — number in the ballpark of 30-40 pages, which anyone could tell you is not nearly enough pages for a legitimate book about a public figure’s life story, and certainly, not enough pages to hold together commentary on climate change, the ins and outs of the Hawaii wildfires’ origins, and the accounts of the victims who lived through it.
In case it isn’t obvious by this point, there’s a good to fair chance that “Dr. Miles Stones” isn’t a real person; given an impossibly fast publishing timeline that somehow transcends the laws of physics and a suspicious and underwhelmingly crafted bibliography to boot, the most likely possibility is that Fire and Fury and the rest of these books published under this name were coughed up by artificial intelligence.
But the biggest takeaway from this is how disgusting the entire development is; beyond the shady, heinous, and downright laughable practice that this mystery person is indulging in, the simple fact that they attempted to publish a cheap faux-account of a still-ongoing disaster that’s claimed an indefinite number of lives, all for the sake of a fast and probably insubstantial buck, is some bottom-of-the-barrel apathy that karma will hopefully act swiftly upon.