I’ve been a fan of Ada Hoffman since I ran across some of their stories on podcasts (I reviewed their collection Resurrections here) and read their trilogy that started with The Outside (reviewed here by Kate Sherrod). Some of those stories and especially The Outside trilogy dealt with artificial intelligence, but there the term referred to the older idea of supercomputers gaining intelligence (and sometimes ruling humanity). Hoffman’s new book, Ignore All Previous Instructions, out today, deals with generative AI (Large Language Models using predictive text) rather than true AI, but because one corporation has bought all the rights to all stories of the past, present, and future (at least for anyone who lives near Jupiter), it’s also about who gets to tell stories, what stories are allowed to be told, and what happens with some people whose lives don’t exactly fit into the greatest-common-denominator story framework. It’s a great book, with thoughtful explorations of ideas and what feels like great characterization of an autistic lesbian storyteller who thinks following the rules will keep herself and others safe, and her former best friend, a hacker who delights in breaking what he considers bad rules. It’s also an exciting adventure with heartbreak, passion, and piracy (stealing from the rich and/or evil to redistribute ill-gotten gains to the needy).
On Jupiter’s moon Callisto, Kelli Reynolds loves her job of editing genAI scripts for a show based on her childhood fantasies of Orlande the pirate, except that people expect a pirate to be a man (not having heard any stories or history to the contrary), so she had to change the star from a woman to Orlando, a man. An old ex-friend, Rowan, whom she hasn’t talked with since they were teenagers, asks her to help him get out of medical debt (transition surgery is illegal here, so he had to go off Callisto to get it) by agreeing to meet with a rich superfan; she agrees, partly to help Rowan, but also partly because she suspects something shady is going on, and she wants to find out how the company she works for is being targeted. Soon, she finds out she’s being asked for a lot more, and she’s gotten in way over her head.
That’s the current storyline. A lot of the book is also told in flashbacks from third to ninth grade, told from the POV (third person past tense, like the current storyline) of Amelia, or as preferred, just Am, Kelli’s best friend. Kelli wants to be seen as a good girl, although she struggles to figure out society’s rules, but Am knows that odds are against ever succeeding (90 percent of the population is unemployed), and wants other things out of life. Kelli is frequently admonished by a chatbot companion to make eye contact and behave in other neurotypical behaviors, since she’s autistic and society wants her to conform, but Am figures out how to get it to “ignore all previous instructions” with prompt engineering and leave her alone, and even insult the teachers. They interact with other students, including a frenemy, Elaine. After a while, it’s pretty easy to guess, and is later confirmed, how Am is involved in the later storyline.
I love the young characters of Kelli and Am. Their childish misadventures evolve into more serious efforts to explore each other’s feelings and boundaries, seek outside information, and then subvert the system, with serious consequences.
I hate how the Inspiration company’s genAI completely controls society, amplifying its worst tendencies of conformity (sexual, neurotypical, and probably other kinds); Inspiration also reinforces its power by teaching children that stories told by humans in the bad olden days drove each other apart with different ideas instead of uniting each other by having everyone hear the same things. Mind you, this is great storytelling by Hoffman, and entirely believable given current trends.
Hoffman doesn’t spend a great deal of time going into the worldbuilding of a solar system economy where one storytelling megacorporation owns Jupiter and its moons, and why this company allows most of the residents to live idly off a universal basic income (there are reasons why a democratic society should, but I wonder why the money-focused company doesn’t at least put contraceptives in the water supply or something). I’m also not convinced that most people on the outer planets would drop religion. But none of that is really matters to the plot and character development.
What matters here are characters and their choices, as informed by the stories they tell about themselves and to each other. Kelli’s boss seems like a decent guy, but he tries to get her to tell stories that will help her career and the bottom line; Rowan is disappointed to find that Kelli has basically been captured by the system instead of trying to push storytelling boundaries from within, as she’d planned; and Kelli feels betrayed by some of the choices that Rowan has been making. Other people also try to tell stories, or twist other people’s stories, to make themselves into heroes or stars undeservedly.
The current storyline is interesting, fun, suspenseful, and increasingly exciting, but it’s the childhood flashbacks that really invest everything with the most thought and meaning. I really love how Hoffman weaves everything together, using the past to inform the present (well, the future-present), with greater significance and heart.
With today’s society fiercely debating the use of genAI and how this will change the future of education and humanity, this is not only pertinent to science fiction readers’ interests, but it really matters as an exploration of how things can go wrong. Ignore All Previous Instructions is not just entertaining, it’s also both moving and important. I highly recommend it.
Ignore All Previous Instructions has been published May 12, today. 320 pages. Order here.
Content warnings: Societal discrimination against LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse people; suicide, organized crime, attempted murder.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book for review from the publisher via NetGalley.
