Tag: academia

ChatGPT writes a trashy novel that fits all the current market trends

So just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to list the post popular tropes in science fiction and fantasy literature right now, pick the most popular subgenre, and write up a novel synopsis that mashes up all of those tropes.

To no one’s surprise, the subgenre it chose was romantasy, but it also threw in dragons, dark academia, and time magic. Here is the complete synopsis:

Here is a tighter, sharper, more compelling 1000-word synopsis that follows the same outline but sells the story harder—maximizing emotional hooks, character stakes, and the high-heat romantasy appeal. Spoilers intact.

The Hundredth Life of the Dragon-Bonded

Rina Ashvale has always been ordinary—poor, unnoticed, unimportant. But on the morning of the Day of Choosing, she wakes with the unshakable feeling that she’s lived this day before. And died in it. Images flash behind her eyes: burning skies, a dragon’s scream, a prince’s hand dripping with blood. None of it makes sense.

Everything changes when Sereth, the most ancient and aloof of all dragons, chooses her as his rider. The bond hits like a lightning strike: thousands of half-formed memories, shards of forgotten lives, and a sense of wrongness in the fabric of the world. Sereth refuses to explain, and Rina finds herself thrust into the elite dragon war-college—completely unprepared, utterly overwhelmed, and lodged in the same wing as the kingdom’s most dangerous cadet: Prince Kael Vorian, heir to their nation’s long-time enemy.

Their first interaction is a disaster. Kael—brilliant, beautiful, and infuriating—sees Rina as an unworthy upstart bonded to a dragon she doesn’t deserve. Rina sees him as an arrogant elite who’s never had to fight for anything real. But whenever they clash in the skies, sparks fly far beyond anger. Something in the dragon bond won’t let them ignore each other.

As Rina trains, she slowly forms a found family with three other misfit cadets—gentle Jory, fierce Thalia, and quick-tongued Marek. Life at the academy carries surprising warmth: late-night mess hall confessions, shared exhaustion after flight drills, stolen pastries in the city. For the first time in her life, Rina feels like she belongs.

But then the déjà vu returns—harder, sharper. She predicts an ambush drill seconds before it happens, saving Kael’s life in a maneuver she can’t explain. When she confronts Sereth, the dragon finally admits the truth:

The world is trapped in a time loop. Ninety-nine times, humanity has fallen to the Void. Ninety-nine times, reality has reset to the beginning of this academy term. Dragons remember. Humans do not.
Except Rina.

Her growing memories mean one thing: she may be the first human in a hundred loops capable of breaking the cycle.

But the moment Rina begins changing events—saving lives that used to be lost, altering training outcomes—the Void adapts. Darker monsters appear. Missions that were once safe become fatal. Jory loses his arm. Marek nearly dies. And Rina realizes a horrifying truth: every change she makes doesn’t erase suffering—it only shifts it onto someone else.

Through it all, Kael remains her fiercest rival and most dangerous ally. Their tension spikes during a magical mishap that amplifies emotion, throwing them into a breathless near-scene neither can forget. During the annual Festival of the First Flame, in the chaos of a Void creature attack, they end up pressed together in a narrow alley, clinging to each other with equal parts fear and longing. When they finally give in to the desire they’ve been denying—an explosive, passionate moment in the dragon stables—they can no longer pretend what’s between them is merely conflict.

But Rina’s growing memories deliver an unbearable blow: in one of the previous loops, Kael burned her village to the ground to slow the Void’s advance. He admits it. He regrets it. He would do it again if it meant saving the world.

Their fragile connection shatters.

As the loop destabilizes, the world begins to tear. Rina slips into the Twilight Reach, the dream-realm dragons inhabit between deaths. There she meets the Hollow King, a godlike Void entity who has been feeding on the loop for centuries. He offers her a seductive bargain: sever the dragon bonds and the loop will end forever—no more death, no more suffering. But it would also mean the extinction of dragons, the world’s only memory-keepers.

Rina refuses. She will not save the world by erasing its heart.

Meanwhile, Kael uncovers a devastating truth: his father, the emperor, is planning a military strike to seize the academy’s dragons, a move that could break the loop catastrophically and hand victory to the Void. Kael offers to kill his father to prevent it. Rina stops him. Instead, she proposes a desperate ritual to jump the timeline forward—getting ahead of the emperor’s plan.

The ritual fails spectacularly.

Time fractures.

The academy splits into two overlapping timelines—the unchanged past loop and the altered timeline Rina and Kael created. Students flicker in and out of existence. Some have duplicates. Others appear as ghosts of who they were meant to be.

Rina’s squad members are caught between versions of themselves. With Sereth’s help, Rina merges their memories, giving each friend the best parts of both lives—even if it costs Sereth more of his dwindling strength. Every memory he surrenders feeds the growing collapse of the loop.

Rina finally understands: dragons carry the burden of memory, but they cannot change it. That’s why the loop always resets. Only a human mind—someone capable of holding all ninety-nine lives at once—can force time forward for good.

She volunteers to carry the full weight of the loop. Kael refuses to let her do it alone.

Together, in the Twilight Reach, Rina and Kael confront the Hollow King. Sereth sacrifices himself to shatter the loop, unleashing all his stored timelines in one final blaze. The Hollow King retreats—but not before warning that breaking the cycle will unleash consequences no one can predict.

Rina and Kael awaken in a world that has never existed before: one without resets, without second chances, without dragons except for a few younglings who survived the collapse. The academy is in ruins. Their nations have fractured. Rina’s village is gone in every timeline. Kael is disowned. The world is raw and wounded—but real.

With their surviving squadmates, they build a small dragon-rider outpost beside a river. Half refuge, half academy, it becomes the first place Rina has ever chosen for herself. Kael stays with her—not as a prince, not as a rival, but as the man who shared a hundred lifetimes of pain and desire with her.

For the first time, dawn breaks on a future that isn’t written.

Standing together in the new light, Rina and Kael speak the vow that binds them:

“We will be the dragons who remember.”

The loop is broken.
The world is reborn.
And their love—forged across a hundred lives—has finally outrun time itself.

So what do you think? Does it sound like something you’d actually want to read? Like something that might even be better than most of the trashy, trendy novels out there, even if it’s total AI slop?

I have no intention of actually writing this book, so if you feel like writing (or generating) it, knock yourself out. Just send me a link if you actually publish it.

The state of science fiction is as bad as Australian breakdancing

It seems like most of the internet is talking about the hilariously bad breakdancing performance given by Australia at the Paris Olympics. Apparently, the “athlete” in question is actually a university professor named Rachael Gunn who specializes in breakdancing studies, or some such nonsense, and the main reasons she got the nod to compete are 1) the Australian breakdancing scene is woefully small, 2) she’s (allegedly) an LGBTQ+ woman, with all the right political opinions, and 3) her husband was on the committe that made the decision to qualify her. Taking advantage of those three factors, she’s apparently made a name for herself in Australia, even winning some local competitions—because who would dare criticize such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? So of course, she went on to compete on the international scene… and made such a mockery of herself and her sport that the judges awarded her straight zeroes, and the Olympics committee pulled breakdancing from the 2028 Los Angelos Olympics. Wah wah.

While this story is rightly hilarious, and proves the eternal truth that wokeness ruins everything, I can’t help but notice the parallels between the state of Australian breakdancing, that someone so inept and untalented could leverage a “studies” degree to dominate it, and the current state of science fiction. Specifically, this is the comment that made me think about this, which is worth reading in full:

The relevant part is this:

Rachael represents so much of what is totally lecherous about cultural studies academics. Pick a subject area that will be under-studied in your context, so you can rise through the ranks quickly (how many break dancing academics will there be in Australia?), and wreak absolute havoc in lives of the people you want to study. There is no limit to the sheer disrespect they will dole out, purely for self-advancement.

Now, I don’t think science fiction was ruined in quite the same way, ie by being dominated and colonized by academia through “studies” degrees. Science fiction was probably too large to be overtaken that way. However, the pattern is still similar, and from what I can tell, it goes something like this:

Step 1: Take over the institutions in the field that are primarily responsible for determining and evaluating excellence.

In Australia, the breakdancing field was small enough that academia was able to dominate and (for lack of a better word) colonize it, becoming the arbiters of excellence within that art. It certainly helped that the professor who had carved out this academic niche for herself was married to one of the judges in the committee that was tasked with determining excellence. This created an incestuous (and ultimately nepotistic) relationship between academia and the judging panels.

In science fiction, something similar happened with SFWA and the Hugo and Nebula awards. I’ve written before about how SFWA ruined science fiction, so I won’t repeat all that here. But the basic gist of it is this: as science fiction became more established, the organizations and publications that talked about science fiction became more authoritative on the subject of the genre than the actual writers themselves. Because of this, achieving recognition for excellence became less about creating works of actual merit, and more about gaining the approval of the people who had built their careers talking about science fiction, rather than actually creating it. And the best way to gain their approval was to join those institutions yourself, rising up in the pecking order until everyone else was beneath you.

This basically describes the career trajectories of John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, two insanely woke authors who leveraged their tenure as SFWA president for award nominations. Both of them seem to have spent at least as much time and effort talking about science fiction as they have in actually creating it: Scalzi through his blog, which he leveraged to get his first book deal, and MRK through both her blog and the Writing Excuses podcast.

Step 2: Purge those institutions until they are ideologically pure.

This step is critical. So long as the instutitions are focused on merit, the only way to climb the ranks is by creating something of merit. But once the institution has become ideologically possessed, with all of those who reject the dominant ideology being purged from positions of power, then merit no longer matters, and the way to the top becomes clear. Those who are the most ideologically pure, as demonstrated by their virtue signalling, will rise to the top. This has the added benefit of quelling all merit-based criticism, since those beneath you fear having their own ideological purity called into question.

From what I can tell, this is how Rachael Gunn rose to prominence in the Australian breakdancing scene. After all, once academia had colonized the field, who would dare question the merits of such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? In a similar manner, Scalzi and MRK rose to the top of SFWA by virtue signaling their own ideological purity and intersectional victimhood status, squelching any criticism by labeling their critics racist, sexist, bigots, homophobic, etc.

Step 3: Redefine excellence in your own image.

In the Australian breakdancing scene, this was accomplished through the combination of Rachael Gunn’s academic work and her husband’s position in the committee that qualified the Olympic competitors. And while it probably isn’t quite so blatantly nepotistic in the science fiction world, the pattern still holds true when you look at what the Hugos and Nebulas have become. This was what the Sad Puppies controversy was actually about, and because the Puppies lost, the Hugo and Nebula awards have been insufferably woke ever since:

Step 4: Use the captured institutions to purge the field of potential rivals.

The final step in this projection is to squash all of those people who represent a threat to your domination, because they have merit and you do not. Ignoring her perhaps overly generous assessment of Australian breakdancing, this is what Hannah Berrelli is talking about when she mentions all the “hundreds of Australian athletes who will have dedicated their entire lives to athletic excellence” whose blood, sweat, and tears were overshadowed and rendered irrelevant by Rachael Gunn’s Olympic stunt.

In science fiction, we see this in the fact that David Weber has never been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula, or that Jim Butcher’s sole Hugo nomination lost to No Award. Both of these men are far better writers than the majority of award-winning authors, especially in our current era. You could make a solid argument that Dan Simmons or Orson Scott Card were superior, but Scalzi? Jemisin? Kingfisher?

And what about all of the new and relatively unknown authors? At least Weber and Butcher already have large followings, which they have rightfully earned through their merit. But when merit is no longer the determining factor in recognizing excellence within the field, what chance do talented up-and-coming authors have if they aren’t willing to play the ideological purity games? Answer: not a hell of a lot.

So while you laugh at how ridiculous Australia’s breakdancing performance was at the Olympics, understand that the same dynamic has been playing out in modern science fiction for years. And honestly, the results are no less ridiculous.