Writing Against the Machine: A.W. Prihandita’s Sci-Fi Critique of AI
When Anselma Widha Prihandita stepped onto the stage at the Kansas City Marriott Country Club Plaza on June 7, she glanced at her seat and whispered to herself, “This isn’t a mistake, is it?” Moments earlier, she had been announced as the winner of the 2024 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.
The Nebula Awards, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), had listed her as a finalist since March. But even when SFWA President Kate Ristau called her name, Anselma was in disbelief.
“I thought it would be someone else. It didn’t register right away,” she told Magdalene in a Zoom interview (17/6).
Although she’s relatively new to publishing speculative fiction, Anselma has long been immersed in imaginative worlds. As a child, she devoured Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings in second grade and dreamed of writing stories of her own. Still, that ambition was placed on hold as she pursued a more “practical” path.
“I kept hearing that being a writer would leave you broke,” she said. So, she chose academia. During the pandemic, however, like many others who had picked up long-abandoned hobbies, she returned to fiction writing.
“Back in undergrad, I took a creative writing class. But those were assignments. During COVID, I wrote because I wanted to.”
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A scholar with a sci-fi lens
After graduating with a degree in English Literature from the University of Indonesia, Anselma received a teaching assistantship in 2018 to pursue her master’s and doctoral studies in language and rhetoric at the University of Washington. The program covered her tuition in exchange for teaching undergraduate students. She completed her PhD just days after receiving the Nebula Award.
Her academic and cultural experiences heavily inform her fiction. Her dissertation examined how Indonesian graduate students in the U.S., despite being fluent in English and possessing in-depth subject expertise, often struggle to be understood in academic settings.
“There’s a gap in communication that isn’t about intelligence or language,” Anselma said.
The idea of being fundamentally misunderstood inspired her award-winning novelette, “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being”. It tells the story of a human doctor named Semau, who works on the alien-inhabited planet Nusa (it means island in Indonesian). One day, a rare species called Plyzmorynox, represented by a patient named Txyzna, walks into her clinic with a mysterious complaint.
Semau’s AI-powered diagnostic machine fails to interpret Txyzna’s physiology. As the only doctor in the region, she faces a dilemma: either follow the rules or treat him using self-observation, a practice only allowed for higher-ranking “scholar-doctors.” Defying protocol, she chooses the latter.
“Aliens are fictional, but they allow us to highlight real-world issues that are harder to address directly,” Anselma explained.
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Critiquing AI through fiction
Semau’s defiance is not just about saving a patient, but it is also a critique of systems that rely too heavily on AI. In the story, artificial intelligence governs medical knowledge. However, for Anselma, this fictional setup reflects a real-world concern. How AI systems can never fully capture the range of human knowledge, particularly the lived experiences of marginalized communities.
“If AI becomes the sole authority, anything outside its database risks being invalidated,” she said. “That can deepen existing inequalities.”
Her concern goes beyond fiction. Anselma views AI not only as a flawed tool but also as a potential monopolizer of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. “The more we validate AI models as complete, the more we sideline those who are not included in their data sets.”
Anselma also applies her critique of AI in the classroom. As an academic writing instructor, she employs labor-based grading, an approach that rewards effort rather than perfection in output. “At the start of the academic year, I tell students, ‘Please don’t use AI. I want to see your true growth.’”
She believes that many students turn to AI out of fear of writing poorly and fear of receiving a bad grade. “But learning should not be about perfection,” she said. “It should be about process.”
That doesn’t mean she hasn’t caught AI-written essays. “AI writing is often grammatically correct but logically off,” she said. When she spots inconsistencies, she challenges students: “I’ll ask, ‘What do you mean here?’ and they often realize something’s off and fix it themselves.”
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To Anselma, these teaching moments are part of a larger effort to resist AI’s creep into domains where it doesn’t belong.
“Using ChatGPT doesn’t just affect the product; it has ripple effects. It impacts the environment, violates intellectual rights, and contributes to marginalization,” she said.
The victory of “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being” is more than just a literary win—it’s a statement. A.W. Prihandita has joined the ranks of celebrated sci-fi writers not by imagining distant galaxies alone, but by raising essential questions about who gets to define knowledge in an increasingly automated world.
