Queer space pirates fighting the mundane evils of AI
Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman is a book about the power of stories to help us figure out who we are, the ramifications of giving a corporate AI the power to decide what kinds of stories are told, and what happens to the people it leaves out of those stories.
The story is told from the perspective of Kelli Reynolds, an autistic woman who lives on Callisto and works as a script supervisor for Inspiration, a media company that also runs the surrounding system. Kelli has been contacted by an ex, an old friend from school, named Rowan, who needs a favour. Rowan is trans, and Inspiration has outlawed surgery for trans people, meaning that hormones for trans people are a controlled substance. Kelli worries that he’s in trouble and agrees to meet him. Shenanigans ensue.
Interspersed with the chapters about Kelli in the present moment are chapters featuring Kelli as a child and teenager. In these chapters, we see the development of her friendship with Rowan (who we meet as a girl named Amelia, who quickly begins to go by ‘Am’ and eventually chooses the name Rowan).
Ignore All Previous Instructions is a fun heist story where Kelli gets tricked into helping her old friend steal intellectual property from Inspiration. To do this, they have to fight Inspiration’s community standards enforcement division as well as a criminal syndicate. Rowan has styled himself as something of a space pirate, smuggling “illegal” content and helping people jailbreak their computers so they can read without Inspiration looking over their shoulders.
The story was fun and absolutely worth reading! But for me, what makes this story great is how Hoffman uses it to reveal what a realistic world controlled by a corporate AI system could look like. Hoffman uses the chapters where Kelli is a child to explain the LLM, so they can explain it to the reader like we are also eight years old. This works surprisingly well. In a special lesson, “who does a story belong to?,” Kelli and her classmates are introduced to the idea that Inspiration owns all the stories because it solved the problem of having an LLM trained on stolen data by buying and trademarking not only story components, like pirates and dragons, but also story structures like “misunderstandings and redemptions, comedies and tragedies, romances and victories over impossible odds.” Then the company trademarked the names of places and famous people. It ended up owning all the intellectual property of storytelling, so it became the only one who could tell and sell stories.
The discussion of a world crafted by a corporate AI kept me thinking about this book long after I’d finished it. I have been an AI hater from the beginning, mostly due to ethical and environmental reasons, but Hoffman clearly shows the possible ramifications of allowing all our content to be created by a corporate-owned LLM: identities deemed “problematic” suddenly just do not exist in stories. Stories with unlikeable or unreliable narrators just don’t get published anymore. We no longer get to see stories where people grapple with trauma, hurt, and wrong, because those stories are too “divisive.”
Hoffman has a PhD in computer science, and their dissertation focused on AI systems; they know what they’re talking about with the tech. In the afterward, they discuss how they thought hard about how AI is portrayed in fiction: “Exaggerating AI’s power and intelligence, even if it’s the bad guy, can sometimes reinforce inaccurate ideas about what AI is really capable of and about what kinds of AI risk are most pressing, and AI companies adroitly use these misconceptions for their own benefit.”
Hoffman demonstrates how AI can constrain the stories we are allowed to tell when, in a flashback chapter, the kids write their own story with a special version of the LLM: “StoryGen—Kids’ Edition!” The program does not actually let them write very much of their own. They can write a sentence and then they’re prompted to ask the LLM to make it “more exciting!,” “happier!,” or “funnier!.” One of the kids wants to write about a shark that eats everything, and laments that there is no “angrier!” button. Instead, the StoryGen writes a milquetoast story about “a shark who was nice and made good choices, because sharks are an important part of the ecosystem and we should not be afraid of them.”
As Hoffman explains in the afterword, “At heart, large language models work—like a very sophisticated autocorrect—by predicting the most likely continuation of a given series of words. This preference for the most likely output causes any biases in the model’s training data to be not only reflected, but amplified. Even without censorious policies like Inspiration’s, the model will be more biased towards the majority, and more reliant on stereotypes in general, than whatever text it trained on, unless very careful training and prompting techniques are devised to counteract this effect.”
In the story, Hoffman shows us how Kelli and Rowan, now queer and neurodivergent adults, grew up without any ability to see themselves reflected in stories. While homosexuality is not illegal in Inspiration space, it’s considered “private” and inappropriate to discuss with minors. So Kelli and Rowan had never actually heard about queer people or different ways of presenting gender until they get access to a parent’s tablet to search for terms like “dyke” and “lesbian”—terms they’d heard as slurs but did not understand the meaning of.
This is a fairly dark book masked behind what Hoffman refers to as an “unsubtle cartoonlike aesthetic.” In addition to the disappearing of queer identities in Inspiration space, we also see what it’s like to grow up neurodivergent in such a society. Kelli, who is autistic, has been issued a companion robot that runs an LLM to “help” her learn to be “normal.” One of their friends, Elaine, goes to weekly appointments with an AI therapist. The robot and the AI therapist cannot help Kelli and Elaine because neither acknowledges that it’s okay to be different.
Ignore All Previous Instructions is a cleverly written space heist book, with surprising depth in its discussion of queerness, neurodiversity, and the harms of AI. It's absolutely worth reading.
Highlights:
- Well done queer and neurodiverse characters
- Contemplates harms of corporate AI
- Space pirates doing a heist
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention.
Reference: Hoffman, Ada. Ignore All Previous Instructions [Tachyon Publishing, 2026].
POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.
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