The Gentle Romance by Richard Ngo

Twenty-two illuminating fiction stories from leading AI researcher Richard Ngo.

In Lentando, a ‘zero-knowledge’ consultant pieces together a secret from her deleted selves that could threaten the world order. In The Gentle Romance, a lonely man discovers a profound connection through his neural interface. In The Witness, a man wakes up in the future—again, and again, and again.

In these richly drawn worlds, lovers may merge minds, personalities can fragment across millions of copies, and AI powers dictate new political systems.

Ngo’s stories span the range from playful to terrifying to awe-inspiring. One by one, they invite us to consider how we might be transformed—willingly or otherwise—beyond recognition.

Praise for The Gentle Romance

Full of depth and insight. Richard’s stories push me to think bigger. They are engaging and grounded in real ideas about the future.

— John Schulman, Creator of ChatGPT

Interacting with real AI systems has rendered countless AI sci-fi tropes obsolete. To tell new stories about them, we need someone like Richard Ngo: a gifted writer with direct experience of frontier models’ internals. Ngo’s palette spans AI as existential horror to unadulterated hard science fiction, always imbued with deeply felt emotion. He tells a love story that survives the Singularity, captures the joy of an AI making scientific discoveries, and invents a truly chilling novel apocalypse. Yet even at his cruelest, Ngo is kind, and his best stories are a darkly cheerful superposition of Neuromancer and new romance. They capture both the strange moment we are in and the stranger shape of things to come.

— Hannu Rajaniemi, author of The Quantum Thief

Coming in December

The Gentle Romance

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