Science Fiction as Scenario Planning: The Gentle Romance by Richard Ngo
For our November book club, we’re reading Richard Ngo’s The Gentle Romance, a collection of twenty-two stories about AI and humanity.
In the title story, two people fall in love and gradually acquire the means to share a mind. In “Lentando,” a consultant tries to uncover a secret known to versions of herself that have been deleted. I’d like to read those stories side by side. What one couple welcomes as an extraordinary form of intimacy would be a dangerous breach of confidence in another of Ngo’s worlds. The technology alone tells us very little about which world we are entering.
A forecast usually asks us to follow one course of events. A collection of stories gives us the pleasure of starting again, somewhere else, with someone who has different reasons for wanting the future to turn out as it does.
We’ll discuss the collection as a whole. As you read, choose two stories you’d like to put in conversation. I’m especially interested in pairs where the second story made you reconsider something you had accepted quite easily in the first.
Friday, November 20, 2026 · Noon–1 p.m. Chicago time · Zoom
Hosted by the Institute for the AI Century. Find the book