Ada Hoffmann

Real Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A script supervisor for an AI media conglomerate is caught between her intense need for an orderly life and her deeper, darker queer desires. From the creator of the Outside trilogy, a heartfelt interplanetary epic of identity, longing, and a space pirate who smuggles inappropriate stories.

Kelli Reynolds loves creating stories more than anything in the world. But on Callisto, a generative AI company called Inspiration owns everything, including show more all the media, and only Inspiration determines which stories can be told.

Kelli has a rare and coveted job in which her autism is to her advantage: She precisely edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for Inspiration’s massive TV audience. Her proudest creation is the pirate Orlando—a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Reenter Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan, the person Kelli based Orlando on. Back when they were teenagers, their relationship was a secret. Kelli had thought that Rowan, a trans man, was her schoolmate Em, a girl.

Rowan is tangled up in the black market after he needed to get money for gender reassignment surgery. He needs Kelli’s help with something . . . illegal. So, now Kelli has to decide: Will she risk the safe, tidy story of her life now for the world she once wished for? What would Orlando do?

Passionate, dangerous, and tender, Ignore All Previous Instructions is a sweeping, poignant novel about censorship, forbidden love, and growing up.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When one entity controls the entirety of a resource, controls all access to that resource, and the resource in question is valued highly by enough people, you have the makings of a great story. Food...oil...microchips...stories, doesn't much matter what it is, if there's a control of access you're looking at an inevitable reckoning for the controllers. They will do literally any- and every-thing to keep you, the dupe, hooked on whatever it is; they will cause hideous suffering and death just to keep their power and privilege.

Is this ringing any bells? Anything at all coming to mind?

That's the story Author Hoffmann is telling us. If that story is not to your liking, this is not the read for you.

The execution of the basic story is good. It offers the Resistance becoming an outright rebellion; it uses the characters' genuine, relatable emotional realities to deepen our readerly investment in the events. I was deeply invested in Rowan's multiple axes of rebellion, personal and moral; I found Kelli's deeply personal path through coming to awareness of the wrongs being done to her and to everyone else very convincingly limned by a very talented wordcraftworker.

Why I don't offer a perfect five is Rowan's direct PoV being limited to flashbacks. I found that jarring, when we have Kelli as the direct PoV in past and present. I looked for a structural reason that needed to be the way we were getting the story, but couldn't find one. Kelli's job as a script supervisor, with high-masking autism-spectrum disorder, is very very well used to set stakes believably. Her borning realization of the evil she participates in is *chef's kiss*.

Highly recommended for culture warriors most of all! show less

With the climax and conclusion of this exercise in "Lovecraft interrogations," the question is less about whether protagonist Yasira Shien is going to successfully confront the AI pantheon that has ruled over Humanity for seven hundred years, but what the cost is going to be to her humanity, something she greatly cares about. That's the thing, Yasira is a rather different "chosen one;" she never wanted to be chosen and mostly wanted just to fit in. She would have been the last one to imagine show more challenging the powers that be, let alone in alliance with the eldritch forces of her reality. This means that a lot of the third book deals with Yasira staying on course, apart from the author exploring the roots of the pantheon (particularly Nemesis). I could nickle and dime this book on a number of points, but there are very few SF confections of the last five years or so that I esteem over this trilogy. Highly recommended. show less

Ada Hoffman's Ignore All Previous Instructions is a genuinely fun read that also has substance. The novel is set in what might be our solar system in another century or so, with Earth devastated and human colonies on a number of moons of outer planets. Individual colonies belong to particular corporations and/or crime bosses, so the novel presents a kind of billionaire's capitalist wet dream.

If you're on a corporate colony, everything on that colony is controlled by the corporation, show more including story. Media is produced via AI, with a small bit of human suggesting involved now and then. And media is intended to be utterly uncontroversial—the kind of stuff that people can absorb all day long without thinking about the world outside their own doors or without thinking at all.

One of the controversial elements to be avoided/denied/repressed is anything falling on the spectrum of queer identity and gender beyond binaries. Our central character, Kelli, is a closeted lesbian "writer": she makes suggestions to the AI that really controls the creative process; she doesn't write anything herself. When she's unexpectedly contacted by a childhood friend who has transitioned genders and become a space pirate, her life begins to change rapidly, and she finds herself doing things she never would have considered previously.

So we have dystopia, corporations, crime bosses, a lesbian, a trans man, a series of daring heists—and a genuine moral core to our story. Because Kelli has worked hard her entire life to become a "writer" and is obsessively careful (self-protective, really) about not breaking rules, even though she did break some rules she was younger. The moral dilemma is how one decides what right and wrong are when one can no longer trust the corporations' rules for living.

This book will keep you entertained while simultaneously requiring that a) you consider the human future and b) how to make ethical choices once you accepted that you can't play by the rules, but must decide on your own what is "right" and what is Right.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss+; the opinions are my own. show less

I really hate the current use of "AI"—a thing from interesting science fiction stories about slavery, creativity, personhood, and cool robots—to refer to LLMs and other neural networks—programs that create intelligible output through extremely robust statistical language and image prediction. This novel takes all the stuff happening right now with corporate monopolies and the sublimation of human creativity into industrial slop machines to some realistic dystopian conclusions, and show more somehow manages to tell an interesting science fiction story about slavery, creativity, personhood, and cool robots about LLMs and other neural networks. show less