Notes on The Return of the Magicians

The Return of the Magicians is book #93 of the AI Lore books series, by Lost Books, a Canadian AI publisher.

Written using Claude, illustrated with Midjourney v5.

I’m really happy with this book. It’s pure “old school” Quatriana of the best kind, and Claude did a fantastic job executing stories in the narrative space I set up for it. In fact, I consider this basically “canonical” Quatria lore at this point, with the exception perhaps of the queen chapter.

I arranged and executed on this volume a bit differently. I had my initial set of images, many of which were based off other images I found and used /describe on. If you don’t know, that command does a sort of description of the input image, then lets you generated based on those descriptions. But they never come out looking basically remotely the same as what you put in. They will always share significant elements, but the look is always different.

Anyway, from there, I ended up with a few different clusters of related images, which I dumped into each their own chapter. Then I used Claude to generate stories in my narrative space which made more explicit use of the visual themes of the images. I think it did a great job, and possibly ends up feeling less scattershot than how I’ve worked with images in the past.

Also definitely one of the most upbeat of all the AI books I’ve put out so far, as the Return of the Magicians in the context of Quatrian lore is a joyous event that heralds a new Golden Age. If only!