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?
