Last week, as an experiment, I had ChatGPT write a synopsis for a novel based on all of the most popular tropes in the trendiest and most popular SF&F subgenre right now (which turns out to be romantasy). This week, I did the exact opposite: I had ChatGPT pick out a subgenre and tropes that are super unpopular right now, but were popular 100+ years ago, and write it in such a way that it should appeal to a modern audience. This is what I got:
The Last Chronicle of Atherion
When disgraced investigative reporter Mara Kincaid receives a package from her long-missing mentor, the renowned archaeologist Dr. Alan Somerville, she knows instantly that the man she once idolized is either alive… or on the brink of death. The package contains a battered journal bound in handmade vellum, its pages inked with precise Victorian-style script—and encrypted with the classical ciphers Somerville once taught her.
Inside the journal is the first shock: Somerville claims to have found a hidden scientific enclave deep in the Amazon, a breakaway community founded in 1913 by a cabal of mathematicians, physicists, and natural philosophers who believed industrial civilization was headed inevitably toward collapse. They fled the modern world, sealed themselves off behind a natural fortress of cliffs and magnetic anomalies, and built a society dedicated to preserving rationality and “guiding” the world after its downfall.
Somerville’s entries grow stranger and more frightened as he describes being drawn deeper into this isolated world of relic technology, ritualized science, and people who speak a dialect derived from early-20th-century scientific jargon. The final pages end abruptly—mid-sentence.
Mara, living in the hollow of a career destroyed by a biotech company’s elaborate hoax, sees this as her one chance at redemption. If Somerville truly discovered a hidden society built by scientists who fled the modern world before World War I… the story could redefine her life. Or it could kill her.
She hires a bush pilot and recruits Dr. João Silva, a hard-nosed Brazilian ethnobotanist who believes Somerville went mad. Following the journal’s directions, they travel into a remote region even satellite mapping avoids. Strange phenomena begin immediately: plants glowing faintly at night, ruins arranged with geometric precision, and finally, the discovery of perfectly preserved 1920s expedition equipment—utterly untouched by decay. Someone has been here, and someone has erased their trail.
At night, they pick up a faint, rhythmic broadcast on an antique radio band: a voice chanting axioms, theorems, and fragments of scientific scripture. Silva calls it static. Mara calls it a warning.
When the team scales the final ridge, the jungle falls away to reveal an impossible sight: a vast, hidden plateau ringed by magnetic cliffs, crowned with botanical gardens and stone towers carved with the equations of Maxwell and Faraday like holy writ.
They are captured almost immediately.
The people of Atherion do not resemble the “lost tribes” of colonial fiction. They dress like Edwardian naturalists, speak with the precision of logicians, and treat the outside world as a barbaric wasteland. Their society blends early industrial craft with advanced botanical engineering and neural conditioning; their gardens glow with bio-luminescent trees, their windchimes calibrate emotional states, and their children are trained in “rational virtues” from birth.
The leader of the enclave, an elderly man known as The Curator, welcomes Mara with unsettling courtesy. His philosophical monologues are brilliant and chilling, as he explains the enclave’s founding: a small band of scientists, horrified by the direction of global politics and industry, calculated that civilization was doomed to cycle through collapses. They built Atherion not merely to survive disaster, but to shape what came after.
But the enclave has fractured. Some wish to remain hidden forever. Others, led by a radical faction, want to accelerate the world’s collapse so they can emerge as its saviors.
Mara is placed in comfortable captivity, kept in a suite lined with botanical lattices and soft music scientifically tuned to alter mood. It feels like a benevolent prison—until she realizes her meals are dosed with neuro-modulators and her journal entries are being read aloud in another room. “We observe all variables,” says her attendant with a serene smile.
Somerville is nowhere to be found.
Through careful manipulation and coded notes disguised as botanical sketches, Mara discovers that Somerville infiltrated the radical faction—and then tried to defect. He was captured and placed in Atherion’s most disturbing creation: the Cerebral Echo Chamber, a pseudo-scientific device that uses electromagnetic resonance to amplify the last neural patterns of a dying mind. The voice on the radio was him—looped, fragmented, desperately trying to reach her.
The Curator reveals the enclave’s ultimate plan: beneath the plateau lies a geomechanical engine built on discredited early-20th-century theories of resonance. When activated, it will send a coordinated electromagnetic pulse around the world, collapsing power grids and communications networks. A “humane reset,” they claim—after which Atherion will emerge with preserved knowledge to shepherd humanity into a rational future.
This is the catastrophe Somerville warned her about.
As the ceremony to activate the engine approaches—a bizarre scientific liturgy involving glossolalia of equations—Mara discovers a deeper personal twist: the Curator is Somerville’s father, a man Somerville never knew. Somerville himself fathered a child in Atherion, a boy now grown into a brilliant but indoctrinated young scientist being groomed as heir to the radical faction.
Mara’s breakthrough comes when she deciphers the final encrypted pages of Somerville’s journal: instructions for how to disable the engine. Somerville built part of it under duress, but embedded a failsafe in the design—one that can only be activated by someone who understands both his notes and the mindset of Atherion’s founders. It’s a puzzle only Mara can solve.
With the help of Silva and a small dissident faction within the enclave, Mara stages a daring escape, infiltrating the caverns beneath the plateau. The engine is breathtaking: a labyrinth of tuning forks, pendulums, gears, and crystalline resonators humming like a hive. The Curator begins the initiation sequence just as Mara arrives. A philosophical confrontation ensues—father against son, ideology against truth. Somerville, rescued from the echo chamber but broken and half-delirious, begs Mara to finish what he started.
In the final moment, Mara triggers Somerville’s failsafe, overloading the machine and causing its harmonic network to collapse. The resulting seismic tremors bring down parts of the plateau, flooding chambers and shattering Atherion’s ideological core. As the enclave evacuates, Somerville collapses, whispering the line he tried to transmit through the static: “Utopias fall. Equations break.”
Mara carries him out as the plateau splits behind them.
Months later, she publishes the story as The Last Chronicle of Atherion, combining her report with Somerville’s journal excerpts. The world is stunned. Atherion’s survivors struggle to adapt; their utopian certainty evaporates when exposed to reality. Somerville, recovering but permanently altered, contributes the final entry:
“We sought refuge from the world and became prisoners of our own models. Civilization endures not through isolation, but through the courage to stand in the open, flawed and uncertain.”
Mara closes the chronicle and sends it to press. She has her story—one that will redefine everything she once believed. But more importantly: she has found something no utopia ever allowed.
A reason to face the world as it truly is.
Do you remember those creepy-weird montages from those old 60s and 70s era Disney movies? The ones like Dumbo, or The Three Caballeros–or heck, the entire thing of Fantasia–where all these weird kaleidoscopic shapes and psychedelic colors just move in and out of each other in twisted, convulsing ways? Well, guess what? Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth is like one of those montages in written form, and I loved it.
