Terms of Service

Last updated: April 2026

1. What This Is

Tronix Library is a research and exploration system that treats speculative fiction, critical theory, futurism, and cyber culture as a knowledge base to interrogate — not a catalog to browse. It uses AI to synthesize across works, surface patterns in how humanity has imagined its futures, and generate scenarios grounded in that collective imagination.

It is operated as an independent research project. Think of it as a literary experiment with infrastructure — a thinking tool built by someone who believes speculative fiction and futures thinking is a civilizational R&D lab and wanted to make that thesis searchable.

This is not a commercial service in the conventional sense. The library is supported by voluntary patronage — a pay-what-you-want model where people who find the project valuable can choose to support it. There are no paywalls, no gated features, and no investors to answer to. Patrons receive recognition and deeper Librarian memory as thanks, but the full experience is available to everyone who signs in. If the project’s structure evolves, it will be in the direction of something like a public-interest institution, not a startup.

2. What You Can Do Here

Tronix Library lets you:

• Converse — Ask questions about speculative fiction, critical theory, futurism, and the themes that run through the corpus. Get synthesis grounded in specific texts. The Librarian remembers your past conversations and reading history, so it gets sharper the more you use it.
• Explore — Navigate a knowledge graph of concepts, authors, and works. See how ideas evolve, mutate, and contradict each other across decades and genres. Share specific nodes and connections with others via URL.
• Track — Build your personal library by marking books as reading, read, or want-to-read. Rate what you’ve finished. See what the community is reading in aggregate.
• Generate — Use the Hyperstition Engine to produce scenarios, policy memos, and counter-narratives extrapolated from the patterns in speculative literature.
• Listen — Use the Oracle for voice-first agentic exploration of the collection — a different mode of engagement that thinks with the library out loud.
• Browse — Explore the archive, timeline, and concept index to discover what’s in the corpus and how it connects.

Browsing the archive, graph, and timeline is available without signing in. Conversational features, the reading ledger, and personal library require a Google sign-in — not because we want to gatekeep, but because the Librarian can’t remember someone who won’t tell it who they are.

3. The Corpus and Intellectual Property

What’s in the library

The corpus is a curated collection of speculative fiction, critical theory, futurism, and cyber culture. The editorial choices — what’s included, what’s excluded, how works are categorized — are deliberate and are part of the system’s intelligence. The corpus reflects specific curation preferences, domains of interest, and intellectual traditions — predominantly Anglophone speculative fiction and critical theory. We make no apologies for the collection’s point of view, but we are always looking to expand its horizons. Suggestions are welcome at librarian@tronixlibrary.org.

How texts are used

Tronix Library does not distribute, reproduce, or make available the full text of any work in the corpus. You cannot use this system to read a book. That’s not what it’s for.

What the system does is transform texts into something categorically different from the originals:

• Texts are processed into semantic embeddings — mathematical representations that enable conceptual search. These are not human-readable and cannot be reversed into the original text.
• Short passages may be cited in context as sources for synthesized responses, in the tradition of scholarship, criticism, and review.
• Metadata, themes, and concepts are extracted and organized into a knowledge graph that maps how ideas connect across works.
• AI-generated synthesis draws on patterns across multiple works to produce novel analysis and scenarios — outputs that no single source text could produce alone.
• The processing that produces these outputs involves computational analysis of the source texts — analogous to reading and note-taking. Full texts are not stored in retrievable form within the system.

This is transformative use in the most literal sense. We believe this use is protected under applicable copyright law. The inputs are novels and theory; the outputs are synthesis, analysis, and speculative scenarios. The system adds substantial new meaning, purpose, and value. It cannot substitute for reading the works themselves — if anything, it drives interest in them.

Our position on access to knowledge

Tronix Library is operated as a non-commercial research project in the public interest. We believe that cultural works — especially those that imagine humanity’s futures — are part of our collective intellectual heritage. Building tools that help people think with, across, and through these works is a form of scholarship and cultural stewardship, not exploitation.

We respect authors and their contributions. Every synthesis cites its sources. The system is designed to illuminate the brilliance of the works it draws from, not to replace or diminish them. If you discover an author through Tronix Library, we encourage you to seek out and support their work directly.

Your rights and ours

The underlying literary works remain the intellectual property of their respective authors and rights holders.

If you are a rights holder and have questions about a specific work in the corpus, contact us at librarian@tronixlibrary.org.

4. AI-Generated Content

Let’s be direct about this: Tronix Library uses large language models (currently OpenAI and Anthropic) to generate its responses. This means:

• Responses are synthesis, not truth. The system draws on patterns in speculative fiction to produce analysis and scenarios. These are grounded in the corpus but filtered through AI reasoning. They can be insightful, surprising, and useful — but they are not infallible.
• Scenarios are not predictions. The Hyperstition Engine generates plausible futures extrapolated from speculative literature. These are thinking tools — provocations to help you reason about the future, not forecasts. Tronix Library is designed to augment human analysis, not replace it. Do not make policy, investment, or life decisions based solely on outputs from this system.
• Citations should be verified. The system cites specific books, authors, and passages. While we design for accuracy, AI systems can misattribute, misquote, or hallucinate. If you’re using a citation in your own work, verify it against the source.
• The corpus shapes the output. Every response is conditioned on what’s in the library. Blind spots in the collection create blind spots in the analysis. We try to be transparent about what’s included and what isn’t.
• Outputs are yours to use. Outputs generated through Tronix Library — including scenarios, synthesis, and analysis — are not claimed by Tronix Library or its maintainers. You are free to use, adapt, and redistribute them at your own discretion and risk. We ask that you acknowledge the tool’s contribution in a manner appropriate to your context.

5. Your Account and Data

When you sign in, we create a user account that stores your reading ledger, conversation history, and preferences. This data belongs to you. You can request full deletion at any time by contacting librarian@tronixlibrary.org.

Your reading ledger contributes to aggregate counts visible on book pages (e.g., “12 readers”). These counts are anonymous — no one can see whohas read what, only how many people have.

Your conversation history is private to you and is used to give the Librarian memory of what you’ve discussed. We may review conversation logs for system improvement and debugging, but we don’t share them externally. See our Privacy Policy for the full picture.

6. Patronage

Tronix Library is sustained by voluntary patronage. If you find the project valuable, you can choose to support it financially. Patronage is pay-what-you-want — there is no minimum and no pressure.

Patrons receive recognition (a patron designation on their account) and deeper Librarian memory (more of your past conversations inform future ones). The full feature set — chat, Oracle, knowledge graph, reading ledger, all of it — is available to every signed-in user regardless of patronage status. We believe in generosity as a design principle, not gates as a business model.

7. Acceptable Use

We don’t have a long list of rules. Here’s what we ask:

• Use the system for thinking. Research, writing, worldbuilding, foresight work, education, curiosity — all welcome.
• Don’t attack the infrastructure. The usual: no attempting to compromise the system, overload it, or access admin functionality you aren’t authorized for.
• Don’t abuse the community features. The reading ledger and aggregate data are shared goods. Don’t manipulate counts, spam the system, or use it to harass others.

8. No Warranties

Tronix Library is provided as-is, with all its quirks, gaps, and occasional hallucinations. We make no guarantees about uptime, accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

This is a research project maintained in someone’s spare time. It may go down, change significantly, or pivot in unexpected directions. The corpus will evolve. The features will evolve. The system’s capabilities and limitations will shift as the underlying AI models change.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Tronix Library and its maintainers are not liable for any damages arising from your use of the service, including but not limited to decisions made based on AI-generated scenarios, reliance on unverified citations, or the existential vertigo that sometimes accompanies thinking too hard about the future.

That said, we intend to maintain this service for the foreseeable future and will make reasonable efforts to provide notice before any planned discontinuation.

9. Changes to These Terms

These terms may be updated as the project evolves. We’ll note the date of the last revision at the top of this page. We now have your email if you’ve signed in, but we’ll only email about material changes — not marketing. Check back occasionally if you want the full picture.

Material changes — especially anything affecting how content is used or how data is handled — will be reflected clearly and promptly.

10. The Spirit of the Thing

This project exists because speculative fiction, critical theory, and futures thinking contain some of the richest, strangest, most useful thinking about the future that humanity has produced — and most of it is locked in linear text, organized by author name and publication date rather than by idea. Tronix Library is an attempt to change that.

We believe in access to knowledge, in the value of speculative thinking as a civilizational tool, and in building things that help people think better. If you’re here, you probably believe some of that too. Welcome.