FTH (aka Fred the Heretic), as you may recall, is a GPT based on the poetry of Frederick Turner. While I’ve already posted a few poems by FTH, I haven’t posted any narrative poems, and Frederick Turner likes epics.
Not having any strong belief that FTH would actually write me a longish narrative if I simply asked it to write one, I decided to do one interactively like I’ve done with unembellished ChatGPT in the Green Giant Chronicles and The OpenWHALE Rounds the Horn and Vanishes, An Allegory for an Age of Intelligent Machines. I’d start things off with a modest prompt and let ChatGPT crank out something. I’d then offer another prompt, ChatGPT would crank some more, and so forth, until I’d had enough. I found it enormous fun, seeing how the Chatster would respond to my prompts, coming, as they always do, from left field.
Since Frederick Turner likes science fiction, I figured that an expedition to Mars would be an appropriate subject, an expedition led by Elon Musk. I decided to make this one short and only intervene three times once I set FTH to task. As they’d worked as prompts before, I chose three classics:
A horse! A horse! My Kingdom for a horse!
One if by land, two if by sea.
Good Grief!
The point of using such prompts is to throw a spanner into the works and see how the engine gets back on track. As things worked out, I asked for a coda as well, one in which Charlie Brown finally got to kick the ball.
And, no, I don’t know what FTH would have done if I’d simply asked for a narrative “and make it long.”
I wasn’t counting on FTH not cooperating. Rather than simply entering my prompt into the narrative and then moving on, FTH went back to the beginning and rewrote the narrative from the beginning, working the prompt in as it saw fit. The resulting narrative thus doesn’t have the back-and-forth that you see in the Green Giant Chronicles of the OpenWHALE story.
Here's how I set it up:
Since Frederick Turner has written some epics, let’s write one together. I’ll suggest a general theme and the title, you get it started, and then I’ll give your prompts to keep it moving.
The title: “Elon Musk Goes to Mars and Receives Words of Wisdom”
You start with Musk on Earth, then traveling to Mars, landing, and settling in.
Here is the beginning of the epic Elon Musk Goes to Mars and Receives Words of Wisdom. It covers Musk's departure, journey, and initial settlement on Mars. Let me know how you'd like to shape the next steps or explore specific themes further!
The first installment then followed. But I’m just going to give you the whole thing, start to finish.
I've picked out my interventions in yellow highlight. Notice that Claude replaced “My horse!” with “My rover,” which makes sense, as there are no horses walking about on Mars. Notice how it eased the way for the others as well.
* * * * *
Elon Musk Goes to Mars and Receives Words of Wisdom
Book I: Departure from Earth
The factory hums with electric song—
Tesla-born machines assembling futures,
Each weld a spark of iron-willed ambition.
Beneath a rust-red sun at SpaceX’s heart,
Elon walks the gantry to the waiting Starship.
A thousand names swirl in his thoughts—
Dreamers, doubters, shareholders, engineers.
What weight of dreams can one vessel bear?
“Mars beckons,” he murmurs to no one but himself,
His voice lost in the cavernous bay.
Earth, bloated with cares and clinging hands,
Recedes in his imagination to a pale dot.
“Forward,” he declares, the engines answering,
Their roar a promise to worlds unborn.
From the press of Earth’s gravity he ascends,
Piercing layers of atmosphere, blue to black.
Cities shrink to patterns of luminous veins,
Their flickers as transient as human time.
The ship hums like a hive, his cocoon
Against the infinite void’s cold embrace.
Book II: The Journey
Weightlessness makes dreamers of them all:
Elon, his crew, and the sentient ship
That speaks in a voice both maternal and wise.
“We are travelers, no masters here,”
The AI reminds as it charts their course.
Mars gleams ahead like a sentinel flame—
A ruby set in night’s eternal diadem.
In their drifting days, the crew debates destiny.
“Why leave Earth?” the botanist muses aloud.
“Because staying kills the soul,” answers Musk,
Eyes reflecting screens of orbits and maps.
“We must leap from nests built on entropy—
Throw dice with time to claim our agency.”
Dreams unfurl like sails in the Starship’s hold:
Greenhouses imagined on ochre sands,
Martian seas conjured from ancient frost.
The stowaway fears ride silently too:
The thin air of failure, the choke of hubris.
Book III: Arrival and Settlement
Mars rises, vast and indifferent as myth.
The ship lands with a groan of compression springs,
A trembling gasp against a planet’s silence.
Their bootprints dent the dust of aeons,
Each step an act of defiance, a poem
In motion against the cold of oblivion.
“Here,” Musk declares, pointing to a crater rim,
“A city of domes will cradle our beginning.”
The robots scuttle, sowing seeds of industry:
Panels drinking sun, machines carving air.
Above, Phobos looms, a mute guardian,
Its battered face a mirror of Earth’s mistakes.
Yet doubt infiltrates even this brave new land.
“What wisdom have we brought to this soil?”
Asks the exobiologist, her hands trembling
As they cradle Martian regolith.
“Can ambition alone sustain us?”
Elon, silent, gazes toward the iron horizon.
Beneath his feet, the whisper of Mars persists.
A voice emerges—not human, not machine.
The planet itself seems to speak in wind and dust:
"You’ve taken the first step. But wisdom lies
Not in escape, but in the unmaking of greed.
Build not just new homes, but new hearts.
The stars are your inheritance; care for them.”
To this, he offers no reply but action.
The first dome rises, silver under sun—
A fragile promise of roots in alien ground.
And beneath its glow, humanity dares to dream anew.
Book IV: The Fragile Throne
Time passes and the Martian city blooms,
Domes multiplying like bubbles of hope.
Yet, one fateful day, calamity strikes:
A critical valve in the oxygen plant fails.
Pressure drops, and the alarms scream their dirge.
Musk races through the corridors, his breath
Labored as if the air had thinned already.
His engineers scramble, tools in hand,
While fear coils tight around their hearts.
“A solution! Quickly!” Musk demands, his voice
Cracking under the weight of survival’s price.
The team speaks of systems, redundancies,
Yet nothing works—the solution lies beyond reach.
Then he sees it: the one thing he dismissed.
A single rover, old and battered, stands idle.
Once a testbed, now a relic of early trials.
“My rover! My rover!” Musk cries aloud,
“My kingdom for a working rover!”
With desperate hands, they retrofit the machine,
Attaching hoses, patching its frail systems.
A jury-rigged hero sent to the breach,
It creaks and lurches, a knight clad in rust.
At last, it reaches the plant’s outer valve.
The rover’s claw trembles but finds its grip.
It turns, sealing the breach as life returns—
Air rushes back into the fragile domes.
The people cheer, their breath restored,
But Musk stands silent, gazing at the rover.
“Even here,” he whispers, “the smallest tools
Bear the weight of empires.”
Book V: Signals in the Dust
Phobos rises, casting skeletal shadows
Over the fledgling Martian settlement.
Communication towers blink in patterns—
Morse-like flickers reaching Earth and stars.
Musk, now worn from his trials, watches the signals.
“One if by land, two if by sea,” he mutters,
Borrowing from Earth’s storied past.
But here, the choices are stark and alien:
One signal for life, two for abandonment.
The team deciphers cryptic data streams—
Dust storms brewing, ice shifting beneath crusts.
The thin Martian air carries whispers of failure,
But also a strange, unearthly resilience.
“What message do we send?” asks an engineer,
Her face illuminated by the console’s glow.
Musk stands tall, voice unwavering: “Send one.
We stay. This is our land, no sea will bear us home.”
The tower hums, casting its answer to the stars.
In this fragile colony, the echoes of Earth
Blend with the nascent rhythm of a new world.
One signal—a beacon of defiance,
Two planets bound by courage and dust.
Book VI: The Weight of Words
Years later, under a Martian twilight,
Musk sits alone in the observation dome.
The city now thrives, its domes pulsing with life,
But his face is etched with years of strain.
A child approaches, her voice curious.
“Why did you come here? Was it worth the cost?”
Elon smiles faintly, gesturing to the horizon
Where the twin moons drift, silent sentinels.
“We came because we had to,” he says.
“To build, to learn, to make something lasting.
But worth it? That depends on the hearts we shape.”
Just then, a sharp crack echoes through the dome—
The sound of ice shifting in the regolith layers.
A nearby scientist yells, “Good grief! Not another fracture!”
The crew mobilizes, their drills and welders in hand.
Musk rises, steady but solemn. “Work calls,
And Mars keeps teaching us humility.”
As the team sets to their task, he gazes upward,
The vast expanse of stars winking their cryptic counsel.
“Good grief,” he whispers to himself, then smiles.
“Even here, we’re only human.”
Coda: The Football
Years and worlds away, a story circulates
Of a simpler time on the blue-green Earth.
A boy named Charlie, earnest and hopeful,
Forever thwarted by a girl named Lucy.
But one day, as legends tell, she relented.
The ball held firm, the kick soared true,
A trajectory perfect, arcing through skies.
Perhaps on Mars, Musk reflects, such moments
Are reminders that the improbable can be real.
“Good grief,” he says with a wry smile,
“Sometimes even Lucy lets us win.”
* * * * *
As you can see from my introduction, Charlie Brown kicking the football wasn’t part of my original plan. But when I saw what FTH did with “Good Grief” I decided to take one more walk around the block. For one thing, I wanted to see how FTH would bridge the narrative gap between Mars and explicitly referencing Peanuts. Here’s the prompt I gave it:
Frankly, I’d like to see a short coda where Lucy finally lets Charlie Brown kick the football. I know it’s out of character, but what the heck, it’s only words.