Before I read the spoiler text at the end, I was confused about the postscript. While the main story has a very clear metaphor and intention, the postscript completely diverges from that and instead sets up the intro to a cliche YA science fantasy action novel; it could have been written by James Patterson. I wonder if modern LLMs would do any better.
Edit: I tried it with ChatGPT. It gave a more realistic opener that matches the text better, but it was too explicit in calling back to phrases directly used in the text, like someone trying to show off how much they remember. Plausibly this could be fixed with the right prompting.
I very much enjoyed this short story.
Before I read the spoiler text at the end, I was confused about the postscript. While the main story has a very clear metaphor and intention, the postscript completely diverges from that and instead sets up the intro to a cliche YA science fantasy action novel; it could have been written by James Patterson. I wonder if modern LLMs would do any better.
Edit: I tried it with ChatGPT. It gave a more realistic opener that matches the text better, but it was too explicit in calling back to phrases directly used in the text, like someone trying to show off how much they remember. Plausibly this could be fixed with the right prompting.