I ask Claude what it thinks about the stories that influenced me as a writer in the past twenty-five years.
What is my list?
I am picky when it comes to the stories I consume. They can’t have too much violence, and must have a hopeful feel. Here are my top picks for 2020-2025, in order of my remembering to list them:
- Arrival
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Interstellar
- District 9
- Minority Report
- Wall-e
- Hancock
- The Matrix
- Predestination
- Inception
- Looper
- Free Guy
- Anything by Matthew Reilly (yes even the violent ones, I skipped those parts in the stories)
- Project Hail Mary
what Claude by Anthropic thinks are the common themes of my list:
1. Reality Has a Hidden Architecture Almost every story here reveals that the world runs on rules the characters — and audience — didn’t know existed. A simulated prison (The Matrix), a looping timeline (Edge of Tomorrow, Predestination), a language that rewires perception (Arrival), an NPC gaining sentience (Free Guy), ancient vaults beneath the world (Matthew Reilly). The discovery of that hidden layer is the story. Hail Mary adds a scientific version — the universe contains a microbe that will kill the sun, and one man stumbles onto the blueprint for survival.
2. The Reluctant, Overlooked, or Broken Hero None of these protagonists are ready. Cage is a coward, Wikus is a bureaucrat, Hancock is a drunk, Grace wakes up with no memory, Free Guy’s Guy is literally background furniture. Even Neo is a nobody in a cubicle. Matthew Reilly’s heroes are always the smallest force in the room. There’s a consistent rejection of the chosen-one archetype — these characters succeed despite themselves, through stubbornness, curiosity, or accidental courage.
3. Institutions and Systems Grind People Down District 9, Minority Report, Wall-E, The Matrix, and Hail Mary’s backstory all feature organisations — governments, corporations, machines — that reduce individuals to resources, statistics, or tools. The protagonist’s journey almost always involves realising they’ve been used by a system, and deciding what to do about it. The system is rarely evil in a cartoon sense; it’s just indifferent, which is worse.
4. Time is Something to Be Understood, Not Escaped Arrival, Predestination, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Interstellar, and Inception all treat time as a puzzle with a shape. Crucially, in almost none of them does the hero actually beat time — they learn to read it, accept it, or work within it. The resolution is almost always about surrender and understanding rather than victory. Predestination and Arrival take this furthest: the loop is the answer.
5. The Cost of Knowing Characters who see the full picture pay for it. Louise knows her daughter will die and has her anyway. Joe kills his younger self. Cooper drifts through decades while his daughter ages. Grace knows going home is impossible and stays. This theme runs deepest in the quieter stories — the horror isn’t the knowledge itself, it’s the moment of choosing after you have it. Almost every story here has that moment.
6. Connection Across an Impossible Gap This is where Hail Mary reframes the whole list. Grace and Rocky shouldn’t be able to communicate, understand each other, or care about each other — and yet that relationship becomes the emotional core of the story. Looking back, this thread is everywhere: humans and aliens in Arrival and District 9 (though the latter corrupts it), humans and machines in The Matrix and Wall-E, humans across time in Looper and Interstellar. The stories are consistently interested in empathy under the most extreme conditions of difference. Hail Mary is simply the most hopeful version of that question.
The throughline: You’re drawn to stories where the universe turns out to be stranger and more structured than anyone knew, where an ordinary and unlikely person has to navigate that strangeness largely alone — and where the deepest question isn’t can they survive but what will they choose when they understand the full cost. Hail Mary is probably the purest distillation of everything your list values, because it’s the one where the answer to that final question is uncomplicated joy.