A few people may know I have been posting a serial sci-fi story titled Portland 2175. Sci-Fi isn't something I usually write. The idea was developed during a string of wide-ranging philosophical chats on ChatGPT and Claude AI. Discussion began around Husserl’s Phenomenology, Object-Oriented Ontology, and the works of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton. These chats produced the concepts for the short story satire about Daniel Dennett’s Third Person That Wasn't There, as well as the Object-Oriented short stories:
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Heaven Assembled
Weather Inside
People in Suits
When Objects Tell Stories
The Archivist of Forgotten Smells
The Withdrawal of Objects
I am not a philosopher. I studied Humanities in grad school as an intellectual. I am more aptly described as a storyteller, hillbilly poet who reads philosophy to orient himself with humankind. I only watch sci-fi thrillers and horror movies on occasion, and I don’t have the scientific vocabulary to do what I want with the science in science fiction.
This is where AI comes in.
I can write the story in block paragraph format and then fine-tune it, but I need to do a ton of science research to get the right terminology. Science wasn’t my thing in school. When it came time to dissect frogs, I skipped. Show me a chemistry table, and my eyes will cross. So, I tell Claude what I need to say, program him with a crummy novel I wrote so it is my language I am editing, and have him produce the chapter based on the copious instructions it took untold hours to compile and write. I then go through and edit it over and over until I feel the story's language is right.
Each chapter in Portland 2175 is designed to be a stand-alone, object-narrated story that fits within the serial. The problem with writing with LLMs is that whenever you ask them to “produce” after editing, they are likely to introduce changes to the story and dialogue, the longer the story is. Characters are added and names are given, even if you specifically tell them not to. The technology is unstable. It doesn’t reproduce exact replicas. So you are constantly fighting with it when you make changes, and as you are producing each chapter.
Claude encounters problems with a serial novel due to chat length limits. It takes twice as long to produce a novel with Claude compared to simply writing in Word because of all the times you have to tell it to rewrite. While editing, you will reach the end of the chat and need to start a new one—often in the middle of major revisions. This creates a massive headache because you then have to reprogram the entire novel at the start of each new chat. You can add files to the project and refer to them in your chats, but you can't just tell Claude, “All right, Claude, go ahead and resume producing my edited copy.” In each chat, you have to set up the novel's structure—characters, plot, themes, settings, past episodes, future episodes—so it can generate chapter 18 or whatever. But the output is often a jumbled version that takes hours to untangle and edit.
So long story short, I totally fucked up and started posting Portland 2175 as a serial before it was completely written, out of a concept I developed during my chatbot chats, and relying more on LLM technology than I should’ve.
As I said, I am not a SciFi writer. I work full-time, write for WordPress and Medium for at least as many hours and no pay, and network on top of that. I just don’t have the time to continue producing Portland 2175, as I hone my writing in areas where I am better suited. However, I plan to continue promoting Portland 2175 and the novelette, The Garden, a Portland 2175 offshoot which nobody knows about, because I have just returned from a long blogging hiatus, revamped my blog, changed the name, and begun building an entirely new readership.
I am a storyteller utilizing phenomenology, existentialism, and realism:
What She Said Was Blue
The Suit
Editorial Choices
The Barn Speaks to Debbie
Point Counterpoint
I also like to write Kafkaesque short stories:
Circle Road
Garage Confusion
Citation 4471B
I completed and posted the novella Sessions, a study in modern Realism and Phenomenology.
These are the types of things I will be concentrating on in the near future as I revisit the 24 completed chapters of Portland 2175, rework the story structure, and make changes as time permits. This was another problem since I did not write the entire story first. Elements kept getting added or changed, altering the story. Early on, I decided I needed to introduce many new story themes, characters, and subplots that were missing, and found myself making so many alterations that the story was no longer recognizable as the one I had begun with.
For those of you who’ve read parts of Portland 2175 and enjoyed it, thank you for reading. Again, I am not shelving the series. Just putting it on hiatus until I have time to rework what's been written and map out and write the rest of the story. The 24 Portland 2175 installments can be found here. For a guide to the world of Portland 2175, read here.
