Welcome friend! I recently read Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann, a speculative novel that takes us to one of Jupiter’s moons to explore artificial intelligence, storytelling, queer identity, and coming of age. What stayed with me most was the way the young characters used stories to discover themselves and imagine the lives they might want. The book also got me thinking about human creativity, the choices we have as storytellers, and what happens when those choices are taken away.
I’m delighted to welcome Ada to Armed with A Book today to talk about the world of Callisto, creating characters with diverse experiences, and the many ideas behind this thought-provoking novel. Let’s dive in!
Ignore All Previous Instructions
A script supervisor for an AI media conglomerate is caught between her intense need for an orderly life and her deeper, darker queer desires. From the creator of the Outside trilogy, a heartfelt interplanetary epic of identity, longing, and a space pirate who smuggles inappropriate stories.
Kelli Reynolds loves creating stories more than anything in the world. But on Callisto, a generative AI company called Inspiration owns everything, including all the media, and only Inspiration determines which stories can be told.
Kelli has a rare and coveted job in which her autism is to her advantage: She precisely edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for Inspiration’s massive TV audience. Her proudest creation is the pirate Orlando—a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.
Reenter Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan, the person Kelli based Orlando on. Back when they were teenagers, their relationship was a secret. Kelli had thought that Rowan, a trans man, was her schoolmate Em, a girl.
Rowan is tangled up in the black market after he needed to get money for gender reassignment surgery. He needs Kelli’s help with something . . . illegal. So, now Kelli has to decide: Will she risk the safe, tidy story of her life now for the world she once wished for? What would Orlando do?
Passionate, dangerous, and tender, Ignore All Previous Instructions is a sweeping, poignant novel about censorship, forbidden love, and growing up.
Get to know the author: Ada Hoffmann
Hi Ada! Welcome to Armed with A Book. It is a pleasure to chat with you. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.
Hi! I’m a queer, neurodivergent writer from Canada, and I also teach computer science at an Ontario university. I am probably best known for the Outside trilogy (cosmic horror space opera) and for reviewing autistic books. Ignore is my most recent novel.
Ignore All Previous Instructions is set on Jupiter’s moons, a setting that feels both wonderfully distant and surprisingly familiar. What draws you to moons as settings for speculative fiction, and how do you imagine what life and civilization might look like there?
I like moons because there are more of them than there are of planets, and they’re also smaller – it makes them a good fit for the kind of “island hopping” story that is so common in classic SFF, where the characters can run around to several locations which all have a distinct character and contrast with each other.
Children in Kelli’s world are taught to write with AI from the beginning. What does a society lose when it stops asking children to imagine for themselves?
We actually know a lot more about this, as a society, than we did in 2023 when I drafted the book, because there has been research coming out since mid-2025 specifically about cognitive offloading and about the effect that generative AI has on learning. It’s not good! It’s also, perhaps, fundamentally not surprising to learn that people fail to develop a skill when they have access to a machine that can do most or all of the skill for them. Sometimes this is morally neutral; I don’t think there is anything wrong with offloading my everyday math onto a calculator, for instance (although we restrict the use of calculators in math class for good reasons.) But something much more terrible happens when we offload skills that are inherent to what we value about ourselves as humans – like empathy and critical judgment. I would count imagination among those inherently valuable skills. I don’t get deeply into it in the text of the book because the research wasn’t as available when I was writing, but you can see a crippling lack of imagination in the majority of people on Callisto if you think about it – they’re happy enough to just go about their days aimlessly, and consume the media Inspiration tells them to consume, and not really question anything. But Kelli and Rowan do build the skills of imagining and questioning, partly because of handwavium and partly because Kelli sort of outran the AI – she was always instinctively trying to tell stories of her own long before she started getting formal lessons in how to use the AI to do it. Maybe it’s over-optimistic to imagine that a character like Kelli will exist, but I hope not.
Inspiration has created a world where people don’t necessarily have to work themselves to exhaustion just to survive, and yet that freedom exists alongside extraordinary control over what people can think and create. What drew you to putting those two ideas of comfort and control together?
It honestly came down to a question of what hardships I was and wasn’t comfortable depicting. Imagine if everything on Callisto was the same as in the book, except that instead of getting UBI and being able to live comfortable-if-a-bit-mindless lives, the 90% of the population who didn’t get jobs just straight up starved. It would be a different world, and there would be a level of survival desperation from every single character, right? But that wouldn’t be a world that I would enjoy writing a book in. There’s a bit of dialogue from Elaine at one point which briefly hints that it used to be that way for a short while, but then got better.
Are there other conglomerates or civilizations beyond Inspiration’s reach, and do they have different philosophies about technology, media, and storytelling?
Yes, I think that’s why certain characters talk about setting out for Enceladus near the end of the story, and why there are book titles about odd independent colonies around Triton and so on. It’s not made super clear in the text itself, but I have always thought that Inspiration owns certain parts of Earth and Mars, and then all of the Jovian system, and probably a lot of asteroids, but then that’s it. Everything further out than Jupiter or further in than Earth belongs to other people.
I particularly loved the coming-of-age element of the story. Kelli, Am, and Elaine turn to illegal media partly because they are trying to understand themselves and imagine what their futures could be. Why was forbidden storytelling the right way to explore that journey of self-discovery?
Well, I was concerned about book bans that are happening in real life, and which especially target queer books for younger readers. If you look at the movement against book bans then you will find a lot of queer adults talking about how important it was for them to see positive, relatable, or illuminating examples of queer life in the books and media they had access to as children – or how damaging it was not being able to find those things. I also am interested in Kelli in particular as a character who understands herself and the world through stories, and so even if books were not particularly being banned in Kelli’s world, she would still need to understand forbidden or dangerous aspects of herself through stories.
Kelli’s relationship with Orlando is fascinating and she leans on him more and more as the story progresses. What did Orlando give Kelli that she couldn’t express authentically herself?
That’s such a great question. I think Kelli feels very hemmed in and constrained by the rules of proper behavior, even though the rules also don’t completely make sense to her – a classic autistic woman’s dilemma. But Orlando, being a Robin Hood-esque pirate captain, is a free spirit who doesn’t have to follow anyone’s rules. I think Orlando allows Kelli to imagine freedom and confidence that she can’t imagine herself having in the real world, and therefore to think about possibilities for herself that would otherwise be out of reach.
Kelli, Am, and Elaine are all using stories and media to figure out what they believe and who they want to become. Was there a particular character whose journey of self-discovery felt especially personal to you?
The tragic secret of these three characters is that they are all me. When I get wrapped up in writing a romance between contrasting characters like Kelli and Rowan, it’s usually because they represent two opposing impulses or two sides of me that need to be reconciled. In this book, that is where all three of the characters come from, and they are all equally personal in spite of the contrast between them.
Ignore All Previous Instructions imagines a future where many things we struggle with today have changed, but human desires, fears, and systems of power have a remarkable way of repeating themselves. What did you enjoy most about taking something recognizable from our own history and letting it reappear somewhere as distant as Jupiter’s moons?
What I like about writing stories in far-flung settings like these is that it lets you approach a problem from a bit of a remove, so it’s not as overwhelming, and also pare away all the other parts of reality that aren’t a part of what you actually want to talk about. I have tried to write books set in the real world in the present day and I absolutely can’t do it; how on earth does one talk about the everything-is-on-fire of it all? Even if you can summon the courage to describe the present day accurately, there is just so much of it that any speculative element or character arc that you might try to add begins to feel weak and mundane in comparison. But when I take just a couple of my pet issues that are bothering me and ask, “Well, what if they happened on Jupiter?” suddenly the way forward becomes clearer. And then you also get to play around with fun space details while you are at it. Everyone wins.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
You’re so welcome! Thank you for the invitation.
Thank you, reader, for joining me and Ada today!
Ignore All Previous Instructions is now available wherever books are sold! Be sure to check your local library too. Add this book on Goodreads. You can read my review here.
Many thanks to the Tachyon Publications for the review copy and the interview opportunity! I appreciate every book that meets me in my mailboxes and every author who will take a few moments to chat about their book.
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