Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada HoffmannMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have all the volumes of this author's Outside trilogy, which features an autistic protagonist fighting against extradimensional god-like quantum AI computers. This book has similarities in some respects, including another autistic protagonist. But despite its setting of a future where humanity has spread throughout the solar system and the protagonist Kelli Reynolds makes her home on one of the moons of Jupiter, feels far closer to our world. This is because the antagonists are not sentient computers but predatory corporations which use generative AI to usurp most of the privileges and roles humans have in society. This reaches the point of trademarking every possible iteration of intellectual property and making it illegal for people to create their own entertainment--books, movies, literally any creative endeavor.
The result is a book which, in its way, is more horrifying than any godlike AI, because it feels almost inevitable.
Kelli Reynolds is a "script supervisor" for the streaming series Ship of Fools. She has helped create many of the characters for this popular show, but she does not write the storylines--rather, she edits what the generative AI spits out, and the percentage of input she has on the finished scripts is strictly regulated. Everything must be bland and inoffensive, with no political bias or viewpoints. These types of shows are immensely popular, because Universal Basic Income has been implemented in the Jovian system: a necessity since AI has taken most people's jobs and they have nothing else to do but sit home and watch this so-called "entertainment." The masses also get to vote on the directions the storylines take, the romances the characters have, et cetera.
The story starts with Kelli getting a message from an old girlfriend, a trans man who now goes by the name of Rowan. He wants her help with...something. At the beginning of the story, Kelli is more than a little naive and--I guess "accomodating" is the word, as we gradually discover something happened in her past that makes her reluctant to make waves. She goes with Rowan to another Jovian moon, and from there gets drawn into his life of crime, which involves stealing the "character kernel" of Orlando, the main character of Ship of Fools that Kelli created.
There is a parallel timeline running here, of Kelli and Rowan in the present and Kelly and Rowan's previous identity Amelia in the past. We gradually read the story of both their autistic/queer awakenings, as Kelli realizes she is gay and Rowan realizes he is trans. In this future, LGBTQ people are not quite illegal, but they are definitely discouraged from living their full authentic lives. This culminates in the suicide of Rowan's friend Elaine, and leads to the incident that breaks Kelli and Rowan's burgeoning romance. Elaine had sought therapy from another AI, and this tragically failed her:
It had done the thing the language model always did. It had done its level best to erase the truth of people like Am and Elaine and replace it with the most bland, palatable, averaged-out combination of words that it knew. And when Elaine needed help--with her sexuality and gender, or with whatever had happened with Oscar, or with who knew how many other complicated things--the model had erased the truth so hard that it erased her, too.
The people in charge had made it do that on purpose. They'd made all these laws, saying that you couldn't talk about any of this stuff with minors, for a reason. They'd thought it was worth losing a few Elaines so that they could keep not talking about it. Maybe they really believed this was better; maybe whatever they feared would happen, if they did let people talk about things, was awful beyond description. But the result was the same either way. It wasn't an accident. Someone, somewhere, had bloodlessly done that calculation and decided.
This is the story of Kelli throwing off the shackles of her society, both mind and body; it's also the story of Kelli and Rowan finding their way back to each other. The stakes here are far personal, with nary an alien or a galaxy-wide threat in sight. Yet in a way, this is more scary than a book of that sort, because with all the attacks levied on LGBTQ people in the past few years, this is a future you can easily see coming to pass. And then when you have the terrible corporations, like Kelli's employer Inspiration, adding to people's misery in the name of profit:
All these months she'd worked for Inspiration, so proud of herself, so careful to be good. Rowan had expected her to try to put queer and subversive things into her shows, and she'd never dared. She knew the rules. She knew where her righteous anger could lead if it went unchecked. After the fire, Kelli had tried to be good, by Inspiration's standards. She'd been good for so long, and it didn't matter. Because Inspiration was barely even angry about the fire. What really bothered them was that she was a lesbian, that she cared about other people like her, that she wanted things to change. Even though, the whole time they employed her, she'd never been brave enough to do a single thing about it. The fact that she wanted it was already too much to forgive.
This book lays down a scenario, applicable to its setting but even more to our world, that anything short of the full-throated acceptance and support of LGBTQ people is unacceptable; that not accepting them leads to their death, either of the body or the spirit. That message is never more relevant than now.
Whether or not you like messages in your fiction, this book has the worldbuilding and depth of characterization to pull it off. It's sharper and more in-your-face than the author's previous books, and it's definitely the kind of story we need.
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