Vikingology Podcast · The Art and Science of the Viking Age

Viking Blood and Blade

·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

Vikingology opens with CJ Adrian and Terry Barnes welcoming historical fiction author Peter Gibbons from Kildare, Ireland. CJ jokes about being told not to say "special guest" or "super excited," then says both anyway. Peter is introduced as the 2023 Kindle Storyteller Award winner, and the hosts treat that as a clear sign of how far his work has reached. The conversation quickly shifts from introductions to the practical business of moving a manuscript from draft to something publishable. Peter explains that a book can go through structural editing, proofreading, and copy editing, depending on whether it is self-published or sent through a publisher. The hosts lean into the modern problem of keeping a human voice intact while more tools try to imitate one. That turns into a longer riff about AI, publishing, and the small honor-system checkbox asking whether AI was used in making a book. Peter says he asked ChatGPT to imitate his style and the result missed the mark badly enough to be reassuring. CJ and Terry pick up that idea and compare AI to a parrot, good at repeating sounds but not at doing the thinking underneath them. The conversation stays blunt about synthesis, and Peter argues that the real pleasure is still in planning a battle scene or shaping the feel of a Viking town or settlement. They keep circling back to the ordinary work of making a story feel lived in. That means details, judgment, and a sense of place rather than just vocabulary and costume. The episode also keeps its comic timing intact. A joke about verified human being written lands as a sideways answer to the current anxiety over machine-made prose. From there the chat drifts, as this show likes to do, into King Arthur. Arthur gets treated as a Viking-adjacent problem, which is exactly the sort of move Vikingology enjoys making. The hosts and guest end up in a playful argument about historicity that cares more about the frame than about tidy purity. The closing stretch keeps the same easy pace and never pretends the topic is smaller than it is. What starts as a guest spot about an author becomes a wider conversation about craft, historicity, and the pleasure of geeking out over the past. It ends the way the show often does, with the sense that Vikings can swallow almost anything if the joke is followed far enough.

As heard by us

A Viking chat about writing, AI, and why human voices still matter.

Vikingology spends this hour with historical fiction author Peter Gibbons, and the interest comes less from action than from the practical work behind a Viking-focused writer.

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Why you'd press play

For a Viking chat that swerves from AI writing to Kindle fame and King Arthur.

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