Benny the Blue Whale, the “scholarly, childish, fascinating and hilarious” (Chris Addison) new book by bestselling children’s author Andy Stanton, is out now in audiobook. Buy yours here.

As announced in The Bookseller, the audiobook is narrated by author Andy Stanton Nish Kumar.

WF Howes senior acquisitions editor Georgia Holmes said:

“Through his Mr Gum series, in particular, Andy has established himself as one of the UK’s most beloved and imaginative storytellers, but Benny the Blue Whale is a completely new departure. It is a bold, innovative and genius experiment in fiction that explores the potential (and flaws) of AI and what our future relationship with technology might look like. Nish Kumar, with his expert comedic delivery, timing and tone, is the perfect narration partner for Andy, and I can’t wait to see how audiobook listeners respond to their stellar performance.”

Most people regard AI chatbots like ChatGPT as streamlining tools, as all-powerful research engines, or even as an imminent threat to their livelihoods. An open letter co-signed by Elon Musk calls for their development to be put on hold, arguing they pose ‘profound risks to society and humanity.’ But Andy Stanton sees things a little differently…

Diving gleefully into the conversation, Andy invites ChatGPT to co-write a novel with him. From a simple initial prompt, man and machine find themselves dancing a bizarre cross-species tango as together they build an increasingly hallucinogenic yarn around a benevolent blue whale and his underwater world. Sometimes the AI wants to play along, sometimes it doesn’t. It all adds to the mix.

This leviathan improvisation raises all sorts of fascinating questions about language, creativity and how we understand stories. Andy interrogates these themes in his extensive and discursive annotations to the text to deliver an ‘exploded diagram’ of a novel that examines the DNA of narrative itself.

Prefer a hard copy? Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent Into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT is out now in hardback. Grab your copy here or, better, via your local bookshop or Bookshop.org.

Follow him @AndyStanton15.