This SciFi series was originally published on Booch News between October 3 and December 26, 2025. New Episodes dropped every Friday.
The series was conceived and written by Ian Griffin with the assistance of generative A.I. — including ChatGPT and Claude for development editorial outlines; Midjourney (images); NotebookLM (research assitance); Grammarly (spell check and punctuation); ElevenLabs (audio voice); and Suno (music).
I was inspired by attending the September, 2025 Stanford Fermented Food Conference. I imagined outlandish futures: that ultra-processed foods are a thing of the past; that crops are grown indoors after climate change devastates farmlands; that absolutely everyone makes home-brewed kombucha.
While some might consider the result “AI slop” the series addresses important possibilities in the areas of climate change, civil liberties, intellectual property rights, and, of course, food and drink.
It expands on the niche topics of interest to the kombucha industry, developed over the past seven-and-a-half years in 400+ articles and 100+ podcast interviews on Booch News, and projects into the future.
A.I. generated content was only used without further editing in limited ways, such as suggesting character names. Research papers into the biochemistry of fermentation were summarized with the assistance of NotebookLM.
I came across a Substack post by Eric Lars Martinsen who comments on writing and generative AI that included a picture that summarizes my process as well, “I didn’t write it alone, either”:
And while it would have been exciting and fun, but incredibly costly, to fly to Nashville, hire a studio and book session musicians to record the songs that appear in Episode 5 – 12, using Suno to put music to my lyrics was *far* more cost effective!
Next steps
I plan to to pull together the material into a cohesive whole and publish it as a novel. Claude generated a very thorough, and challenging, set of guidelines in a 15-page document to help me achieve this in response to the prompt:
Act as a professional fiction book editor. I will provide you with the text of the complete Our Fermented Future series in the attached file. You will evaluate the story in terms of:
- Assess the plot structure (beginning, middle, end, stakes).
- Narrative coherence and logic.
- Pacing – where it drags or rushes.
- Whether the story delivers on its promise (genre expectations, emotional payoff).
I then followed up with a second prompt:
Based on this analysis, please develop a 10-point editorial plan for me to revise the manuscript with an estimate of the percentage of time I should allocate to each step.
These prompts are explored in the blog.