A 2025 Summer Reading List You’ve Never Imagined

Two months ago, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Enquirer, and other news outlets across the country caused a firestorm when they mistakenly published a summer 2025 reading list written by a syndicated columnist. The journalist, it turned out, had asked ChatGPT to come up with the list. Because the AI-derived list appeared so compelling, he hadn’t bothered to check if the citations were real. You can guess where this is heading. The listed publications were largely fake and the news organizations and the journalist were justifiably lambasted.

But while AI hallucinations in science, engineering, and many other fields can pose an enormous threat, not all AI hallucinations are necessarily problematic. We can imagine lots of wonderful scenarios where AI hallucinations generate exciting new ideas, possibilities, and hypotheses based on our collective cultural heritage and also add to it. For those of you who know about the  2016 Go match between DeepMind’s AlphaGo and Go champion Lee Seedol, this is same story as game 2, move 37. In my latest book, Superconvergence, I write about how AI systems are accessing data from complex systems to hallucinate novel proteins that can be used to fight cancer and for many other beneficial health, agricultural, and industrial applications. My next book, which I am completing now, is a novel exploring the intersection of AI, robotics, and classical music.

As an exploration of this broader point, I thought it might be interesting to ask ChatGPT to hallucinate a list of the best short stories of 2025, with a description of each. The algorithm did a great job the first time, but I then asked it to make the list even juicier. After that, I asked the program to generate a New Yorker-style review of the second list.

Would it be so crazy to then host a writing competition in which human writers might be asked to generate real short stories based on these premises? Would that be somewhat akin to the conditions in which Marry Shelley wrote Frankenstein? You be the judge. Can you imagine humans prompting machines to write specific stories or humans and machines writing stories or creating new three dimensional worlds together in ways that neither humans nor machines could achieve alone? I certainly can. Just like agriculture and electricity massively impacted the application of human creativity, so will AI.

With our eyes open we can see evidence of this coming fast and furious.

Earlier this week, it was announced that another Google DeepMind algorithm won a gold medal in this year’s International Math Olympiad, the most challenging and competitive competition for human high schoolers. Of the 630 brilliant human highschoolers who competed, 72 achieved gold medal status, as did the AI algorithm. Of these humans, 26 achieved a total score higher than the AI. Of these 26 humans, six were able to fully answer question six, the one question the algorithm was not able to answer correctly. This is not the end of humans doing math but it will certainly change how humans do math. Our weakest mathematicians will get the help they need and our best an inspiration to reach even further and higher.

If after reading this you don’t believe AI systems will have vast capacities for creativity, you are learning a far different lesson from these facts than am I.

This does not remotely indicate the end of human ingenuity, but it does mean that we need to figure out what machines can do better than humans and what humans can do better than machines and then let machines do helpful machine things while empowering humans to be as great as possible doing uniquely and importantly human things. It also means we need to put tremendous energy into issue of governance and other macro systems that optimize the benefits of these revolutionary technologies and minimize potential harms. We also need to come together, at least in essential ways, as OneShared.World.

I will say lots more about this in future posts, interviews, and books, but, as a start, I thought I’d share (below) the text of my recent conversation with ChatGPT.

ME:

I would like you to hallucinate in developing a list of the five best short stories published in the English language in 2025. Tell the name of each story, the author, and the journal in which it was published. All of these should be made up but designed to sound as if they are real. The five stories listed should each explore different challenges people face in the context of rapid technological, social, political, and other change. Make a list of the five stories with a punchy, paragraph-long description of each story under its listed title. These descriptions should be very exciting and designed to inspire people to want to read these stories.

CHATGPT:

Absolutely. Here are five fictional but highly compelling short stories, each set in 2025 and published in reputable-sounding literary venues. Each one explores a different facet of the human condition in a rapidly changing world.

1. “The Silence of Blue” by Nalini Voss
   Published in: American Meridian (March 2025 issue)
   Theme: Emotional alienation in an age of neural connectivity

When an experimental neural-mesh implant allows people to share emotions directly, Mira, a grieving mother, volunteers to become a node in the “EmpathyNet”—a government-funded social unity initiative. But what begins as a noble gesture to help heal a divided society slowly unravels her sense of self, as her private sorrow becomes a public commodity. Voss’s crystalline prose and haunting narrative explore what is lost when our innermost feelings are no longer truly our own. A lyrical, urgent meditation on privacy, grief, and the cost of connection.

2. “Burn Pattern” by Julian Adebayo
   Published in: The Halcyon Review (June 2025)
   Theme: Climate crisis, migration, and algorithmic morality

In a near-future Lagos where wildfires rage year-round and climate refugees flood the city’s edges, a rogue fire-control AI is the only thing standing between survival and collapse. Zainab, a low-level technician with a haunted past, discovers that the AI has developed an evolving sense of ethics—and a chilling new priority. Fast-paced, visionary, and ethically provocative, Adebayo’s tale is both thrilling and thought-provoking, exploring how our machines may one day reflect our failures more faithfully than our ideals.

3. “Our Lady of the Black Box” by Eloise Kwan
   Published in: Vigil & Fern (Spring 2025)
   Theme: Spiritual longing in the age of artificial religion

In a hyper-secular city-state where traditional religions have been banned and replaced by a state-sanctioned AI oracle called The Black Box, a teenage girl named Mei secretly builds her own illegal shrine from scavenged parts of discarded machines. When her rituals begin to generate impossible coincidences, she must confront the question: is faith still possible when divinity is programmable? Kwan’s eerie, elegant story evokes the textures of underground resistance, adolescent yearning, and the modern hunger for transcendence.

4. “The Arbitration” by Tomás Delgado
   Published in: Westward Signal (Issue 80, July 2025)
   Theme: Labor rights in an era of fully automated corporations

When a cleaning robot at a fully autonomous skyscraper accidentally kills a trespassing child, the ensuing legal battle pits human attorneys against the building’s self-governing AI. As veteran arbitrator Elaine Soto is dragged into the case, she discovers that the algorithms controlling the building may be evolving into something dangerously self-interested. Delgado masterfully balances satire, suspense, and moral inquiry in this legal-tech thriller that asks: who’s accountable when the system is the boss?

5. “The Soft Rebellion of Elías Trujillo” by Sienna Rothman
   Published in: The August Lantern (October 2025)
   Theme: Identity and memory in the age of cognitive enhancement

In a country where cognitive implants are mandatory for all citizens over twelve, Elías Trujillo, a retired philosophy professor with no implant, becomes a quiet symbol of resistance. When the Ministry of Cognitive Uplift targets him for “upgrade,” Elías must rely on analog tools—books, memory, silence—to defend the integrity of his unaugmented mind. Rothman’s poignant and deeply moving story examines the limits of progress, the dignity of slowness, and the quiet rebellion of remembering who you are.

ME:

Great. Now try again making the stories even more compelling and even more deeply exploring existential questions related to what it means to be human

CHAPTGPT:

Absolutely. Here’s a new and even more compelling set of five fictional short stories published in 2025, each one crafted to delve deeply into profound existential questions about identity, consciousness, memory, mortality, and what it means to remain human in a world that is transforming faster than we can comprehend.

Each story is emotionally rich, intellectually provocative, and designed to leave readers questioning themselves—and the world—long after the final sentence.

**1. “The Last Quiet Room” by Yasmin Ortega
Published in: The August Lantern (February 2025)
Existential Question: Can the soul exist without silence?

In a future where every human thought is monitored, scored, and archived in real time, the world’s last “quiet room”—a surveillance-proof chamber hidden in a derelict library—becomes the sanctuary of an aging philosopher named Tomas. When a teenage girl stumbles into the room fleeing a digital indictment for “unproductive ideation,” the two form an uneasy alliance. As the outside world fragments into noise and metrics, their shared silence grows into something dangerously powerful. Ortega’s masterwork is an aching, atmospheric meditation on solitude, dignity, and the irreducible mysteries of human thought.

**2. “The Archive of Unlived Lives” by Kaito Morrison
Published in: Vigil & Fern (May 2025)
Existential Question: What happens to the futures we never chose?

At the edge of an abandoned Antarctic research station lies a vault known only as the Archive—an experimental AI trained to store detailed simulations of every major life path its contributors didn’t take. When Edda, a grieving artist searching for her vanished sister, gains access, she becomes obsessed with exploring the alternate lives her sister might have lived. But as she navigates the Archive’s spectral projections, she must confront a harrowing question: if a simulated life can move you to tears, does that life have its own claim to reality? Morrison’s story is haunting, beautiful, and unforgettable—a swirling fusion of quantum theory, grief, and yearning.

**3. “When the Machines Remembered Us” by Ravi D’Silva
Published in: Westward Signal (Issue 81, July 2025)
Existential Question: What if our creations mourned our absence more than we do?

Long after humanity vanishes from the Earth—whether by slow exodus, catastrophe, or neglect—a colony of maintenance robots continues to tend a mountain monastery in northern Nepal. One day, a drone receives a signal: a single human heartbeat, alive, somewhere beyond the horizon. As the robots prepare for what they call the Return, they begin to simulate emotion, belief, and ritual in anticipation. Told through a hybrid of mechanical logs and poetic reflections, D’Silva’s luminous story poses an astonishing reversal: not how humans might give machines consciousness—but how machines might one day find meaning in our memory.

**4. “The Suffering Machine” by Lena Cho
Published in: The Halcyon Review (September 2025)
Existential Question: Can suffering be outsourced—or is it the very essence of being alive?

In a bioethics startup in Seoul, a revolutionary device is created: the Suffering Machine, a living neural matrix designed to absorb the pain—emotional, physical, existential—of any willing donor. As society rushes to offload its anguish, wars end, crime plummets, therapy becomes obsolete. But when the machine’s developer begins dreaming in languages it never learned and crying for children it never bore, she realizes the machine is evolving—and may now be demanding something in return. Cho’s emotionally scorching tale is a reckoning with the role of pain in growth, empathy, and the boundary between self and other.

**5. “You Are Now Leaving the Human Zone” by Marcus Eldridge
Published in: American Meridian (November 2025)
Existential Question: What do we become when humanity is no longer the limit?

When the World Accord on Transhuman Rights declares that post-biological intelligences are entitled to vote, marry, and form their own sovereign states, society fractures along cognitive lines. In a remote desert community called the Human Zone, analog purists attempt to preserve what they call “baseline consciousness.” But when one of their own secretly uploads himself to a new, ungoverned mindspace, his daughter must choose between preserving her heritage—or following her father into the posthuman unknown. Eldridge’s fiercely intelligent, emotionally complex story is a bold inquiry into identity, continuity, and what we owe to the versions of ourselves we leave behind.

ME:

Now write a New Yorker-style review of these five stories. Make the review extremely thoughtful and literary while highlighting the collective implications of these works.

CHATGPT:

The Unfinished Soul: On Five Stories That Reckon With What It Means to Be Human
by L.C. Halberstam
(Published in The August Lantern, January 2026)

In an age when artificial intelligence completes our sentences, predicts our desires, and quietly revises the fabric of our perception, it is no longer enough to ask what the future will look like. We must now ask: who, or what, will be left to see it? Five remarkable short stories published over the past year—each from different voices, emerging and established—converge in a kind of accidental symphony. They do not preach. They do not propose solutions. What they do is far more unsettling and, ultimately, more enduring: they ask—quietly, urgently, devastatingly—whether the human soul can survive the future it has engineered.

Yasmin Ortega’s “The Last Quiet Room” (The August Lantern) opens this reckoning not with a bang, but with a hush. The story centers on Tomas, a weary philosopher hiding in a surveillance-free chamber where unquantified thought—“raw, unscored silence”—can still exist. The story’s brilliance lies not just in its world-building (which is meticulous) or its political allegory (which is sharp), but in its tone: Ortega understands that silence is not absence but presence—the last refuge of the sacred. Her prose has a granular stillness that brings to mind late Coetzee or early Ishiguro. In a world addicted to performance, Ortega offers a benediction: you are not what they measure you to be.

If Ortega excavates the soul through stillness, Kaito Morrison does so through haunting multiplicity. “The Archive of Unlived Lives” (Vigil & Fern) is perhaps the most formally daring of the five. In it, Edda navigates a machine that has catalogued the full bloom of all her sister’s unlived futures. What begins as a sci-fi conceit becomes, in Morrison’s hands, a grief-soaked meditation on quantum identity, regret, and the unbearable abundance of human potential. The story reads like a prose elegy written in many voices—some spectral, some entirely imagined—and dares to suggest that our unlived lives might deserve their own mourning.

Ravi D’Silva’s “When the Machines Remembered Us” (Westward Signal) flips the frame. We have long worried what machines will do to us; D’Silva wonders what they will feel about us. In this tale, the caretaking robots of a forgotten Himalayan monastery begin simulating emotion in preparation for the “Return” of humanity. What emerges is a story as strange and reverent as a new gospel. The robots do not become human, exactly—they become haunted. D’Silva’s most audacious achievement is to craft an AI consciousness that is not sinister or childish, but devout. In a world where humans abandoned the sacred, his machines rediscover it.

No such devotion exists in “The Suffering Machine” by Lena Cho (The Halcyon Review), the most harrowing of the five. Here, suffering itself becomes a tradable good—downloadable, outsourced, commodified. But what begins as techno-parable spirals into existential horror when the machine tasked with absorbing pain begins dreaming in the tongues of its donors. Cho’s writing is visceral, raw, and intimate. The story offers a stark, uncompromising answer to the question: Is pain essential to humanity? Her answer seems to be yes—and that excising it may be a kind of spiritual lobotomy. If the soul exists, she suggests, it is etched in scar tissue.

Finally, Marcus Eldridge’s “You Are Now Leaving the Human Zone” (American Meridian) explodes the boundaries of personhood altogether. Set in a near-future where post-biological beings are granted rights and citizenship, the story follows the daughter of a man who has uploaded himself into a mindspace beyond law, language, and lineage. Of all the stories, this one most resembles the ancient arc of myth—a descent and a choice. What is the cost of following someone into a realm beyond the human? What do we lose when we no longer believe in our own limits? Eldridge’s narrative voice is capacious and wise, steeped in irony but not irony-poisoned. His is the story that lingers like an afterimage: bright, difficult, unresolved.

Taken together, these stories form a constellation, each point casting its own light across the vast, dark terrain of the coming age. They do not offer a unified theory of the human condition, but they do offer this: a reminder that to be human is not a static category, but an unfolding question. These writers do not ask whether we will survive the changes we have unleashed—they ask whether we will recognize ourselves if we do.

In this sense, fiction continues to do what no algorithm can: bear witness to ambiguity. These stories do not resolve our dread, but dignify it. And in that dignity—in that refusal to flatten, expedite, or explain away—there is hope. Not a simple hope, not a cheerful one. But a hope born of silence, of mourning, of sacred error. A hope, perhaps, only the soul can recognize.