159 – After the Full Stop with Philip Charter
From Plebchain Radio by Avi Burra and QW
May 15, 2026 · 1h 24m
About this episode
Philip Charter joins Avi Burra to discuss the nuances of storytelling in relation to Bitcoin and the challenges of writing fiction in this context.
Philip Charter, fiction writer, prose editor, the man behind totallyhumanwriter.com and the editor of the 21 Futures Bitcoin fiction anthologies, joins Avi for a conversation about storytelling, the slow craft of prose, and the gap between the two that most people don't see until they try to cross it. The thread that runs through the hour: Bitcoin is not the story. People don't care about Bitcoin, they care about the impact it has on their own lives, and the work the space is sleeping on is the work of showing those impacts in human terms. They argue that Bitcoin-centric fiction faces an almost impossible bind: Bitcoiners treat fiction as frivolous, and non-Bitcoiners read anything orange-tinted as a scam. The more interesting territory is stories where Bitcoin lives quietly in the plot rather than wearing laser eyes on the cover. From there the conversation moves into the long apprenticeship of prose, the chasm between a great oral storyteller and a workable sentence on the page, and the unmistakable tells of AI fiction – the stacked adjectives, the spectral humming, the silences that stretch, the quiet everything. Avi shares his own experience using AI for the first pass of…
People in this episode
Host: Avi Burra
Guest: Philip Charter
Topics covered
- storytelling
- Bitcoin fiction
- prose craft
- AI in writing
- impact of Bitcoin
- short story form
Keywords
- Bitcoin
- fiction
- storytelling
- prose
- AI
- short story
- impact
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: totallyhumanwriter.com
Books & works: 21 Futures Bitcoin fiction anthologies
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