I originally published this on my old site. It's been two years, and the conversation around A.I. has gotten even more heated. More and more writers are hearing about their books being scraped to "train" large language model generators. Like before, this post isn't about the dangers A.I. represents to creative communities as it's being used now. It doesn't matter how we feel about it. That Pandora's Box is open. We can't close it. The best we can do is work toward being so good and so original that we write the kinds of books that A.I. would never create for the sheer audacity of the books.  Sure, A.I can churn out basic, plot-based narratives following basic story structures, and lazy "writers" are flooding the market with them, hoping to make a quick buck. However, I also believe that discerning readers will constantly seek out books that they can read with the assurance that no machine could have written. Here's an updated list of 10 books/series A.I. would never generate.

1. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan - The first book to make it into 10 for Tuesday twice. No chapter in this book is written from the same perspective. One of the chapters isn't even prose. The whole time, as the chapters move up and down the timeline, some separated by decades, Egan maintains consistent unspoken threads that I don't think A.I. is going to grasp anytime soon, if ever.
2. Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline - Some people have argued that A.I. could generate a story full of pop culture references. ALmost certainly. However, the intermixing of wordplay and the pure fanboy passion Cline infused into every page of this book,  and weaving those references into a story in such a way that also helps both character development and moves the story forward is just will defy A.I./LLMs for decades, if not longer. The "joust" scene alone proves my point.
3. Redshirts, by John Scalzi - I'm including this one for much the same reason I'm including Ready Player One. The levels of meta that permeate this book would be impossible for an A.I. to emulate. No amount of playing with prompts like, "Write a post-modern, meta-fiction spoof of Star Trek," would generate this book.
4. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes - A.I. couldn't handle the language aspect of the narrator's transition between intellectual states. More than that, it couldn't offer those transitions with tension and empathy required to make this one of the all-time classics of science fiction.
5. Riddley Walker, by Russel Hoban - If A.I. couldn't handle Flowers for Algernon, then it really couldn't handle what's possibly the most brilliant post-apocalyptic novel ever written. Even if A.I. could manage to keep the pidgin English of this narrator's voice consistent, I don't think it could do so while maintaining a coherent narrative. And that's not taking into account the subtle Huck Finn and Punch and Judy thematic elements at all.
6. Solar Bones, by Mike McCormick - A.I. will likely never be able to handle a stream-of-consciousness story from the perspective of an Irish civil engineer reflecting on his life while walking through his house, told in a single sentence. This level of creative brilliance will be beyond anything other than a human mind.
7. Malazan, by Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont - With over 20 books, many of them doorstopper tomes, spread out over multiple generations and continents, and a cast of well over a hundred named characters, not to mention the vast array of disparate cultures interacting... yeah... In book #8 of the main series, a sentence refers back to a paragraph in book #1. A.I. just ain't gonna be able to do this level of narrative cohesion.
8. Discworld, by Sir Terry Pratchett - Another series, but one vital to this conversation. It's going to be a long, long time before A.I. can handle humor on any but the most basic levels, let alone deep satire and irony, let alone with the levels of grace and compassion of the human condition that Pratchett offers throughout these books.
9. The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin - While this series doesn't hit my aesthetic joy buttons like other books on this list, I love that these books exist because they've gotten genre writers thinking about creating stories in new and interesting ways. Keeping the experimental structure, non-linear narratives, and level cultural conflicts straight enough to have several coherent narratives just ain't going to happen for a long, long while from A.I.
10. The 9/10 Memwar, by M. Todd Gallowglas - When I first started these 10 for Tuesday lists, I meant to not mention any of my personal works, but this one fits too well because it takes in some bits of what A.I. does but takes them to places I don't know that A.I. will be able to go in the foreseeable future. I'm including this book because, as the author, I can talk about its creation process more than I can the other works on this list. I owe the structure of this book to Reasons She Goes to the Woods. The narrator's voice comes from Riddley Walker, Flowers for Algernon, and Beast of No Nation. The story comes out of a lifetime of reading fantasy novels and playing RPGs. The process came from getting a leather journal and seeing if I could write a compelling story one page a day for a year. Oh, yeah, and then part-way through asking supporters of my Patreon to give me random words to include every month. These influences are just too disparate, varied, and crazy for A.I. to generate into anything other than a jumbled mess.

That's my list. What do you think? Got any other crazy books or series that could only come from human imagination?*Note: Following the links on this page will result in a slight commission for me. Every bit helps.