Interactive fiction for readers.
Most "AI story" tools want to be chatbots. We want Cosmonaut to be a book you can step inside.
Interactive fiction is older than computers. Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler reads like a hypertext novel written in 1979. Borges spent a career writing stories about the kind of stories he could not quite write. Long before either of them, oral storytellers were stopping at firesides to ask the listening children what the hero ought to do next, and revising in real time.
The form has a name in literary studies - ergodic literature, after the Greek for "work" and "path." The defining feature is that the reader does non-trivial work to traverse the text. Not in the way every reader works - eyes moving, mind constructing - but in a way the book itself acknowledges. The book hands the reader something to do, and the reading changes because of it.
Where the AI ones usually go wrong
When you ask a language model to generate a story, by default you get something that reads like a transcript. The model writes a paragraph. You type a reply. The model writes another paragraph. The result is a conversation about a story, not a story. There's no narrator with a voice. There's no shape. There's no chapter that ends well, because the model is not really writing chapters - it's responding.
The other failure mode is gamification. You wind up with stats and inventory and HP bars and combat rolls. The story becomes a thin layer of flavor over a mechanic. This is fine for what it is, and there are people who love it, but it is a different thing than reading a book.
What Cosmonaut tries to be instead
Cosmonaut is prose-first. Each branch of the story is a fully written chapter, in a consistent voice, paced toward a decision point the way a chapter is paced toward a hook. Between choices, you are reading. Not chatting. Not selecting actions from a menu. Just reading the kind of prose you would read in a paperback you actually liked.
There are no stats. No grind. No autoplay. The map of the story is visible whenever you want it. You can write a custom action when the presented choices don't match what you meant to do, and the story will continue from there in the same voice. That is the baseline; everything else is restraint.
What it is good for
A short list, from people we have watched use it:
- Cozy mysteries. A small village, a strange disappearance, a curious narrator with the patience to wait for you.
- Historical fiction. A 1920s Paris adventure that knows what year it is and what year it isn't.
- Soft science fiction. A generation ship with a quiet secret in its archive.
- Literary fantasy. An empire built on the bones of a sleeping god.
- Coming-of-age. A teen apprentice mapmaker on a first commission.
Cosmonaut is family-friendly by default, but it is not only for kids. Adults are welcome to use it for their own reading, at their own pace, in their own genres. The vocabulary controls work in both directions.