Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman
A queer coming-of-age story set on and among the moons of Jupiter.
Ignore All Previous Instructions will invade your heart with its slow intimacy. It’s a detailed portrayal of two queer, neurodivergent kids learning about who they are, unfolding moment by emotional moment. Kelli and Am, middle school comrades, are each destined for a unique identity, and are each creative and powerful people, and yet the world they live in seems determined to squash them, ignore them, grind them into the usual shape so they can make the usual noises and do the usual things. Fortunately, they have each other. This story of love and friendship is warm-hearted and expansive, as their story together spans their time apart. It’s a beautiful example of how people can love each other, and find themselves in each other, no matter what.
The story takes place on and between the moons of Jupiter, in space colonies and on space ships, but these characters could easily have stepped out of the late 20th century, when representation of queer or neurodivergent characters was so limited, and many folks like Kelli and Am had to figure things out in secret. The most poignant moment of the book was the kids’ search for stories and shows where they could see themselves on the screen, illegal because the corporation that owns all the stories believes most people don’t want to see that. At one point Kelli wonders what it would be like if she could freely read about people like herself. Very touching! There was a little dissonance between the story’s future setting, where the colonies have adopted the idea of basic income and housing, and the regressive policies about gender conformity. Not that a future culture couldn’t backtrack on acceptance, but more time could have been spent delving into why.
A lot of time is devoted to detailing exactly what it was like to be these characters in these bodies, experiencing these identities, and readers will appreciate the empathy with which these characters are presented, and the care that’s taken to make sure they’re depicted not just in conflict but in peaceful contexts that accommodate and support them too. For the story’s sake, there could have been more conflict and jeopardy -- it did feel like plot problems were resolved by other more powerful people, and the main characters were left to focus on personal things. There was a heist, some back-and-forth about questionable loyalties and betrayals, but in the end this book is focused on the characters, not the events they are living through.
I have seen this book described as a critique of AI and a championing of human creativity. It was actually more a critique of capitalism and a championing of freedom of expression. Protagonist Kelli is a script supervisor for a popular TV show, written by AI but “supervised” by her. There were some fine distinctions drawn between human thought and generative AI, but the character accepted the process of using a human-designed “kernel” to instigate an AI-generated story, and there were plenty of illustrations of prompting and managing output that made it seem like a perfectly fine way to write stories. I was waiting for this acceptance to reverse, but it never did. Restricting the subject matter by making it all heteronormative -- that was presented as more of a problem with the corporation that controlled all the IP, not the AI that was writing it.
Yes, we need to question who controls the stories, but we also need to question who creates them. I was very distracted, listening to this novel, by trying to identify any “AI wrote this” tells. I really wish that weren’t something that readers now have to think about, whenever there’s an odd digression or the repetition of a specific phrase. Unfortunately, that is just the world we live in right now. Is Hoffman raising an alarm about generative AI, as well as corporate control over IP? They have developed the characters so conscientiously, but some big picture questions are still murky.