Tag: ChatGPT writes a novel

ChatGPT writes a sword and planet novel for the modern age

Last week, I posted the AI-generated synopsis for a trashy romantasy novel that hits all of the hottest current tropes. This week, I thought it would be fun to do something similar, but to pick a genre that has fallen out of favor in the last 50 years and see if we can’t update it for modern tastes.

So I asked ChatGPT to list some subgenres that were popular 50+ years ago but have fallen sharply out of favor in our current time, then list some of the tropes that define that genre, and combine those tropes with more popular tropes today. The subgenre we went with was sword and planet, and after going back and forth a few times, I think we came up with something decent, if not great.

(FYI, I went back and forth with the AI a lot more times with this one than with the trashy romantasy novel. As a result, it has a lot more of my own fingerprints on it, which you can probably tell if you read it closely enough. But I did rely heavily on the AI.)

Star-Crowned

Ava Mendoza is a brilliant but shy engineering graduate student who has never once seen herself as important, beautiful, or heroic. She prefers equations to people, and predictable routine to anything resembling danger. So when a late-night experiment catastrophically collapses into a quantum anomaly and a wormhole drags her out of her own world entirely, she has no idea she is about to become the center of another world’s prophecy.

She wakes in a burning red desert beneath a sun that flickers like a faulty light—sometimes blinding, sometimes dim, always unstable. Before she can orient herself, the sand erupts into a crystalline predator that hunts using refracted solar flares. Death seems certain until sky-clan warriors descend on insect-wing gliders and drag her to safety through a blur of heat and blade-light.

The moment they spot the battered silver watch on her wrist, everything changes. To Ava it’s a sentimental relic from her father; to the sky-clans it is the legendary “Clock of Worlds,” the unmistakable sign of their prophesied Star-Crowned Princess. She insists they’re mistaken, but the hope in their eyes is too hungry, too desperate. And their leader, Kade Thorne—scarred, disciplined, unexpectedly gentle—treats her with a respect she doesn’t know how to process.

Aelion is a world in collapse. Its red sun flares unpredictably, unleashing radiation storms capable of wiping out whole regions. Long ago, a lost civilization built the Aureole Shield, a planet-spanning defense lattice meant to regulate the sun’s tantrums. But now the shield is failing, and only a tyrant thrives in the chaos.

High Imperator Veylor—ruthless, brilliant, and dying slowly from radiation poisoning—has convinced many that only he can save the world. He sees in Ava the perfect weapon: a beautiful, exotic woman whom the people already whisper about in half-remembered prophecy. If he enslaves her, he doesn’t just possess her; he possesses their hope, their fear, their future. It’s not her power he wants. It’s her image. Her symbolism. Her body as a banner of conquest.

Ava flees with Kade and a small fellowship—Syrin the guilt-stricken telepath, Pira the razor-tongued scout, and Talen the scholar-priest whose fascination with Earthborn oddities borders on worship. Their journey across Aelion is lush, terrifying, and breathtaking: crystal forests humming with ancient data, floating citadels trembling on failing grav-cores, ruins haunted by swarming nanites humming like ghosts of the old world.

And between dangers, Ava and Kade move closer. They share warmth on freezing nights; they exchange glances that linger too long; he corrects her sword stance with hands that hover at her hips longer than necessary; she teases him about his old-fashioned courtesy. When Veylor’s hunters ambush them and Kade draws a battered Colt Peacemaker revolver—an impossibly out-of-place Earth weapon—Ava realizes he’s been hiding a truth as wild as her own.

He came from Earth too. Born in 1887, swept through a wormhole in a lightning storm, stranded here decades before she was born. The admission ties them together in ways neither is ready to voice.

But Veylor’s net tightens. He spreads word that Ava is his destined bride, his divine right. The Aureole Shield’s core is sealed behind defenses only his personal slaves and prisoners may pass. No army can storm it. No warrior can break in. And no other path leads to saving the world.

Ava understands the truth with terrible clarity: if she wants to reach the shield, she must let Veylor take her.

It is the most frightening decision she has ever made, and the bravest. She and Kade plan her “capture” together. He hates it—nearly breaks when she touches his cheek in reassurance—but he promises he will come for her. Not as a hero rescuing a damsel, but as her partner fulfilling the dangerous, brilliant plan she created.

When Ava surrenders to Veylor’s forces, the tyrant is ecstatic. He displays her like a trophy. He mistakes her trembling for fear, not strategy. He believes she is broken. He believes he has won. And because he assumes she is powerless, he brings her into the holy of holies: the Aureole Shield’s control chamber, a throne of living metal and starlight older than memory.

He demands she activate the shield for him.
Instead, she rewires it beneath his nose.

Ava uses her engineering expertise—her intuition, her quick thinking, her Earthborn perspective—to sabotage his takeover, reroute the shield’s systems, and trigger a hard reset that locks him out permanently. When Veylor lunges at her in rage, Kade storms into the chamber, fighting the tyrant in a brutal, desperate duel while Ava works to bring the shield back online.

The Aureole Shield ignites in a cascade of radiance. Aelion’s sun stabilizes for the first time in centuries. Veylor dies screaming that only he deserved its power.

And then—unexpectedly—the energy surge tears open a new wormhole. A shimmering, perfect doorway home.

For the first time since the desert, Ava falters. Earth calls to her with familiar, safe monotony: her graduate program, her half-finished research, her tiny apartment filled with loneliness she once endured without question. Returning would be easy. Predictable. The life she knew.

But she is no longer the woman who left. Aelion has carved her into something new—braver, bolder, desired, seen. She wants Kade. She wants the sky-clans. She wants to live vividly, fiercely, unapologetically. She wants to be what she has become.

She turns away as the wormhole closes on its own.

In the days that follow, she embraces her destiny fully. Ava dons the ceremonial finery of the sky-clans—not as a costume, but as her true skin: elegant, powerful, sensual. She becomes the Star-Crowned Princess by choice, not prophecy. Kade bows to her not out of submission, but devotion. She takes his hand as an equal, radiant and unafraid.

The shy engineer is gone.
In her place stands the woman who saved a world—and claimed her own heart in the process.

Ava Star-Crowned, Princess of Aelion.
A warrior’s beloved.
A world’s hope.
A legend just beginning.

What do you think? Is it something you might want to read? I’m not gonna lie: there’s a part of me that’s tempted to write AI slop, and a novel like this is something I could happily run with.

Or maybe… what if I wrote a book of interesting novel prompts for generative AI, designed for someone to copy-paste into ChatGPT (or their AI model of choice) themselves and have the AI write the story for them? The AI could then adapt the story to the reader, based on their reactions and what they like about it. What do you think? Would you buy a book like that?

ChatGPT writes a novel mashing up unpopular tropes

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.

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.