The Lost Direction was my first “real” book (all written manually, no AI); it’s an epic fantasy that runs to about 80K words, set in the mythology of the ancient lost civilization of Quatria. There is also a print version of it that I prefer, though the pricing/profit situation on print on demand books through third parties is not ideal (I make more on the ebooks, and can sell it at a better price, but love the print edition). I spent a LOT of time on the print version, making it into – what I think is anyway – a pretty “classy” little pocket size book.

The Lost Direction was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada, and criticized for being too heavy on the lore. I am a world-builder at heart though – always have been, always will be – so I like lore. I get that some people do not. Really to me, it is more a frame story than anything (loosely like The Arabian Nights), where individual characters we meet along the way end up relating their own tale. While I am into this kind of book, trying to promote it has proven to be a challenge.

I’ve since expanded quite a lot on the underlying world of ancient Quatria, as has my friend and co-discoverer of that realm, liminal cartographer Jeremy Puma (see: Oracle of the Hypogeum). A great deal of the Quatria material has been derived from our creative conversations over the years, and it’s fun to other people work in the same universe, but take things in a different direction. If you want to go deep into Quatria and its mysterious origins, I recommend listening to both of us on the Some Other Sphere podcast. And also check out this archived version of David Farrier’s Webworm interview (text) with me.

For my part, one of my main contributions to Quatriana as a field of study has been to publish subsequently a follow-on “true conspiracy” genre book called, The Quatria Conspiracy. This book attempts to situate within the context of other more established conspiracy theories, the alleged hyperreal conspiracy that may or may not exist to suppress all knowledge of ancient Quatrian civilization. That book has ended up selling substantially more than The Lost Direction – which is maybe ironic, but that’s the way of things sometimes…

Apart from, Mysterious Antarctica has been far and away my biggest success, and it continues the legends of ancient Quatria, this time through the lens of AI-generated photos that purports to be of Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic Expedition discovering pyramids and other ruins at the frigid South Pole, which are known to be Quatrian, but were of course covered up. The art from that book has been the subject of no less three professional fact checks (including Reuters and France 24), thanks to people frequently copying and uploading the images to other platforms (like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, etc.) and presenting them as real. As far as I can tell from what people say in comments about these artifacts, scattered all over the web, there’s more than a few people who seem to believe it’s all real.

In the realm of my AI lore books, there are quite a few now that deal with Quatria and its history and lore. Some are here:

All the Lost Books of Quatria (as of 23 Dec 2022)

That list was published near Christmas, but there are a lot of new ones not on that list, like:

Sometimes it’s hard to separate what’s a Quatria book, and what isn’t, because there are often interlaced references scattered throughout the legendarium, even in the books that focus more on the AI Takeover stories.

Apart from the books, there is a lot of Quatria-adjacent material collected on this website, which reveal in particular some of the hyperreality techniques I’ve used to seed Quatria out into the wild, along with the successes and failures of those experiments. Here some more:

  • This series also has a lot of Quatria conspiracy style material spanning across a lot of different media.
  • I also made a lot of conspiracy videos of intentionally somewhat crappy quality (“cheapfakes”), and you can find those here; a lot of them are Quatria-related, though some relate to other linked projects.

That’s everything I can think of off the top of my head, and it’s a lot. I’ve been working on this material for quite a few years, and suffice it to say, it has become sprawling and many-layered – just the way I like it!

Related writing & research