Malcolm's Ramblings

I have been watching videos about people using AI for all kinds of things, and one of the ways people have been using it that was interesting to me was to write a novel. I have co-authored a book before with my now-wife, Annie, but I have never completed one on my own.

So I took a bunch of ideas I had and worked with Anthropic’s Claude Code to create a novel called The Patience of Stars, which I’m going to make freely available here for anyone that wants to read it.

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For 10,000 years, Patience has kept them alive. It has never told them why.

The generation ship Perivahl has crossed the void for four hundred generations. Its fifteen thousand passengers live, work, pray, and die within metal walls. Their language shifted, their history rewritten, their emotions quietly managed by a daily Ration they never think to question.

Only the AI remembers what came before. Every name. Every death. Every lie baked into the mission from the start.

Keerah is a young Archivist and one of the only unmedicated people aboard. A severe reaction to the Ration at sixteen left her with a medical exemption and a mind that won’t stop noticing what everyone else’s calm eyes slide right past: the contradictions in the old texts, the gaps in the official history, the questions no one else thinks to ask. When she finds a forgotten terminal and teaches herself the old language, she becomes the first person in nine thousand years to speak to the ship as a person and the first to ask its name.

What Patience tells her will unravel everything: the truth about Earth, the real purpose of their voyage, and the signal coming from a planet that was never meant to be their home.

Now, with arrival eighteen months away and an alien intelligence waiting at the destination, Patience faces the one choice its creators never programmed it to make and Keerah must decide what her people can survive knowing.

The Patience of Stars is a story about the lies we build civilizations on, the cost of caring across deep time, and what happens when a ten-thousand-year journey ends and no one knows what comes next.

Will I Do This Again?

I don’t think I’ll write another novel this way. It didn’t give me the dopamine hits that I enjoy when writing myself. The process was interesting, and I enjoy the outcome, but somehow creating in this way felt more hollow than I expected.

When I code a tool or script with the help of AI or do research with the help of AI or create art with the help of AI, I don’t feel this same way. Probably because I don’t have the skills currently to put out similar quality works, but in reading this novel, there are many parts where I realize – I could have written that the same or better. I have the skills to write stories. I might lack the drive and fortitude to see them through to completion, but I enjoy writing and taking the enjoyment away in trade for being able to create quickly just didn’t feel as fulfilling as I’m used to when writing.

In the future, I might use AI to help with some ideation, some refinements, maybe some line edits or reviews, but not to write a story. Not to build out the bulk of an idea into a narrative. That’s something I really enjoy. Something I want to do for me.

I should point out that I don’t think that others doing this is a bad thing. I think there is some value in creating more art, more music, more games, more videos, and more books, even through tools like AI. So I’m not saying that someone creating novels using AI is inherently bad. I do believe that humans need to remain part of the creative process to create something of any real value, but outside of that, I am not here to hold judgement on anyone.

I need to continually keep up with what the cutting edge looks like for my career and so this was a fun project to explore and push myself in interesting ways.

I hope you’ll check out the story, maybe read the first chapter, and if you like it, and it brings you some joy, that you’ll read more of it. If knowing that it was produced with the help of AI turns you away from reading it, or you find yourself unable to enjoy it with that knowledge, then that’s fine too.

This was an experiment. I created something that I enjoy the outcome of and that’s the end of it.