Cover of Ada Hoffmann's 2026 science-fiction novel Ignore All Previous Instructions, published by Tachyon Publications.
Photo credit: Cover art by Elizabeth Story / Tachyon Publications
Ada Hoffmann had pieces of a new novel long before they knew who its villains would be. They wanted to write a space heist with a lot of female characters and a charismatic trans man, and had sketched unpublished writing about queer characters growing up that eventually informed Kelli and Rowan’s childhood. During a round of brainstorming in 2023, Hoffmann decided the heist would target a company controlling storytelling through generative AI. That decision “made every other element of the book snap into place,” Hoffmann said in an email interview.
Published by Tachyon Publications on May 12, 2026, Ignore All Previous Instructions follows Kelli Reynolds, an autistic script supervisor living on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. Kelli works for Inspiration, a corporation that owns the rights to stories and produces entertainment through its AI system. Her job is to turn that output into acceptable television. When Rowan, someone from her childhood, returns to her life, he brings her into contact with people who are telling and circulating stories outside the company’s control.
Hoffmann, who lives in eastern Ontario and teaches computer science, drew on their research into computer-generated creativity for Inspiration’s StoryGen. They also had to account for Kelli and Rowan’s shared childhood while controlling what the reader learns about it.
The human in the loop
Kelli is good at her job. She cares about the television program she helps make, particularly its pirate hero Orlando, a character drawn from stories she told as a child. To her, editing Inspiration’s output is a legitimate form of authorship. She has grown up in a world where the company defines what creative work looks like, and she has no obvious reason to assume that another system is possible.
“Her job is what she’s been told that creative people do, so she does it,” Hoffmann explained. Other people in the novel, including Rowan, have very different opinions of Inspiration’s entertainment. Kelli nevertheless puts genuine effort into her work, imagining her characters’ experiences instead of limiting herself to checking whether the generated material meets the company’s requirements.
“Kelli refuses to take those cognitive shortcuts because she loves using her imagination too much,” Hoffmann said. They connected that impulse to the idea of keeping a “human in the loop,” a phrase often used by proponents of AI systems. Kelli’s investment in her stories is precisely the part of the process her employer begins to regard as unnecessary.
Orlando also complicates Kelli’s relationship with Rowan. The fictional pirate is an idealized version of someone she remembers from childhood, able to move through adventures without the uncertainties and personal difficulties that Rowan faces as an adult. Hoffmann said they understood the characters’ shared history before they had fully worked out their adult story. That history gave Kelli reasons to be drawn to Rowan and reasons to resist reconnecting with him.
Writing from Kelli’s point of view meant deciding when to let readers understand that resistance. Hoffmann said earlier drafts offered too many clues about a major event in the characters’ past. They reduced the foreshadowing while considering what Rowan himself would choose to explain. Kelli already knows what happened; the reader must piece it together through what she remembers and avoids.
Writing from an autistic perspective
Hoffmann has written autistic characters throughout their career, including in the Outside trilogy, and they speak about Kelli’s perspective as something inseparable from their own approach to prose. “To be totally honest, I can’t not write prose from an autistic perspective,” they said.
They pointed particularly to how their characters recognize and describe emotions. A character may experience something intensely and still need time to identify the feeling in words. Hoffmann suspects this difference in expression has contributed to past manuscript rejections in which readers said they could not connect with the characters. They stressed that Kelli’s narrative voice was not an artificially constructed technique designed to depict autism; it came from how Hoffmann themselves approach emotional language.
That perspective is also central to the book’s revelations. Kelli’s need for rules influences the way she understands her childhood, her work and Rowan’s return. Hoffmann described the challenge of presenting a complete history through a character who already remembers it, without giving readers all the information at once. Early beta readers helped them judge what a reader was likely to infer before the intended moment.
Censorship and the stories AI permits
Hoffmann’s interest in a corporation controlling creative expression grew out of their concern about book bans and the increasing use of generative AI. They said both developments raised fears about queer writers losing the ability to reach readers. Inspiration gave them a fictional institution capable of exercising control through both copyright and the stories its machines would produce.
The novel’s StoryGen system also has a connection to actual research. In 2022, Google researchers published a study of Wordcraft, a writing assistant tested by 13 professional writers. Hoffmann drew on the tool’s editing controls while developing StoryGen, and singled out one participant’s difficulty getting Wordcraft to support a lesbian romance. According to the study, the system repeatedly suggested introducing a male character or turning the relationship between the women into friendship.
Hoffmann said the research interested them because the writers often had to accommodate the tool’s preferences to finish their own stories. In the novel, Kelli has lived with a version of that compromise for so long that she understands it as an ordinary part of creative work. Her encounters with art made outside Inspiration’s system force her to reconsider how varied a story can be.
This became a larger concern during revision. Hoffmann said the original manuscript concentrated so much on the suppression of queer stories that it left another issue underdeveloped: what happens when all writing must pass through a generative system, even if that system does not censor queer characters. They expanded Kelli’s reactions to human-made work that uses unfamiliar styles and breaks the narrative rules she has learned.
A classroom scene rewritten from the ground up
One substantial change took place in scenes from Kelli and Rowan’s childhood. In the original manuscript, Kelli attempted to write a story on a tablet and received warnings about violating Inspiration’s copyright rules. Rowan tried unsuccessfully to bypass the restrictions, and a teacher arrived to explain the company’s control over storytelling. Hoffmann felt the scene relied too heavily on characters standing around explaining the rules.
They replaced it with a classroom exercise in which the children must use StoryGen for themselves. The new version lets their reactions carry the information. Elaine becomes discouraged when the system cannot accommodate the kind of story she wants to tell. Rowan rejects the assignment. Kelli discovers she can work effectively within its constraints, producing a story that still bears traces of her own imagination.
That rewrite required changes to other childhood scenes, particularly those showing how Rowan helped Kelli connect with people. Hoffmann said the revised sequence did more to establish why these relationships mattered later, and it clarified how the characters’ different responses to Inspiration began early in their lives.
An apparently smaller revision changed the technology available throughout the novel. Editors pointed out that a heist involving physical data sticks would make little sense if the characters could simply transmit the information wirelessly. Hoffmann chose to remove Wi-Fi from the fictional setting rather than rebuild the heist, replacing wireless communication with devices that have to be plugged in. They used Jupiter’s powerful magnetosphere as a speculative explanation for why the technology might not work reliably in their world.
In an October 30 post on their website, Hoffmann announced The Priest of Crawling Things, a fantasy novel scheduled for May 2027 publication by Canadian publisher Wolsak & Wynn. They described a coming-of-age story about a nonbinary young adult transported to the spirit world, where they must bargain with a trickster spirit to prevent a war. Hoffmann wrote that the decision to approach Canadian publishers was theirs and recalled meeting two of Wolsak & Wynn’s editors at Can*Con a few weeks earlier.
