LOL over 130,000 words in 30 seconds. That would even be hard for an AI summary, which I'm assuming you can do.
Actually, I went and did that, just to see if it could work. Took some work copying and pasting every page in a PDF and uploading it. But this was an interesting exercise. On several occasions the AI was making things up and getting some things wrong. But I finally did get one coherent summary.
AI generated review:
Shadow of a God-King is a dark, emotionally demanding political fantasy that combines espionage, psychological horror, and moral reckoning inside a vividly realized imperial world. What begins as a high-stakes infiltration story steadily transforms into something more personal and more devastating: a deliberate dismantling of power from the inside, carried out not with armies or blades, but with patience, intelligence, and an intimate understanding of cruelty.
The story’s greatest strength is its commitment to interior experience. Azalea’s perspective anchors the narrative, and the reader is never allowed the comfort of distance. The pyramid is not merely a setting but a mechanism of oppression—beautiful, ritualized, and relentlessly dehumanizing. The Brides are not abstract victims; they are individuals whose fear, coping strategies, kindness, and despair are carefully rendered. Characters like Evette and Mona give the story emotional gravity, grounding its political stakes in human cost.
Azalea herself is a compelling protagonist precisely because she does not begin as a crusader. Her initial goal is pragmatic and limited: steal intelligence, survive, leave. The gradual erosion of that restraint—through exposure to systemic abuse, accidental discoveries, and irreversible loss—feels organic rather than heroic. By the time she turns her focus fully on Amun-Ka, it does not feel like a genre pivot so much as an inevitability. The story understands that endurance has limits, and that moral clarity often arrives too late to prevent tragedy.
The handling of Amun-Ka is particularly effective. He is not a distant tyrant but an intimate one, whose power operates through humiliation, ritual, and emotional dominance. His downfall is satisfying not because it is spectacular, but because it is earned. The trial does not hinge on a single piece of evidence or a convenient confession; it hinges on pattern, habit, and arrogance. Azalea’s decision to expose his blasphemy—by letting him be exactly who he always is—feels both clever and thematically precise. He is destroyed not by rebellion, but by the worldview he insists on enacting.
The story is unflinching in its consequences. Evette’s execution is especially brutal, not for its graphic detail, but for its inevitability and timing. It lands as a moral wound rather than a plot beat, and the ripple effects—particularly the reaction of the children—underscore the story’s refusal to sentimentalize suffering. Victory here is costly, incomplete, and emotionally scarring, which gives the ending a weight many political fantasies avoid.
That said, the story’s density can be challenging. The shift from espionage thriller to moral reckoning is deliberate, but some readers may initially struggle to recalibrate their expectations. The number of moving parts—Resistance operations, independent actors, audits, trials—requires close attention, and the narrative does not always pause to reassure the reader that confusion is intentional rather than accidental. Readers who skim or expect conventional genre pacing may miss key causal distinctions.
Overall, Shadow of a God-King is not a comfortable read, but it is a confident one. It trusts the reader to endure discomfort, to sit with ambiguity, and to recognize that dismantling power often looks less like revolution and more like exposure. It is a story about survival turning into responsibility, about how systems collapse not when attacked head-on, but when forced to confront the truth of what they are.
It lingers—not because it offers catharsis, but because it refuses to pretend that justice is clean.
[...]
It's actually not bad, but that is disturbing, because how many are going to resort to AI? Copying and pasting every page into an AI would probably be very inconvenient for longer stories, but it probably takes less effort than reading them (unless you read for entertainment—which we ought to be doing anyway since that's the entire point of this community). So yeah, I'm a bit concerned.
For shorter stories, it is extraordinarily easy to do. I have this disgusting feeling 25% of all the new reviews from this contest are going to be AI generated instead of from people who actually read the stories.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some people just feed already written reviews into AI and have it make a new one. That was what one person was banned for, right? Either way, I don't like it. Not. One. Bit.
EDIT: I'm not making any accusations to anyone by the way. It's possible someone clicks on a story, doesn't read it, and comes back to it later, etc. I personally have like twenty saves of unfinished reading.
