Deliriant is the 117th book in the AI Lore Books series, by Lost Books, a Canadian AI publisher.

The book is comprised of around a dozen or so flash fiction vignettes telling the story of a generation starship called Deliriant, along with a related fictional encyclopedia entry to round out the offering. The ship is hurtling from an unknown past to an unknowable future, and the occupants of the ship are a collective of artists tasked with keeping alive their culture, and the bio-technological ark that is the ship.

Occupants of the ship are all fitted with neural lace and a system called the Weave which connects them psychically with one another and with the Deliriant itself, and its super-intelligent AI called Core. The artists of the ship work tirelessly on personal and collective works using the Weave, and a tool called the Mirror, which is able to draw from the collective unconscious memories of all prior inhabitants of the ship, called the Vault.

This world-building ultimately arose out of an idea I had years ago and have been nursing on the back burner ever since after watching a great of Star Trek: what if we could have starships without captains and without hierarchies? What if the Enterprise were a worker-owned collective?

Image-wise, the book mixes Dalle3 and Midjourney v 5.2. I’d let my MJ sub lapse for some months, until I heard about the new Style Tuner, which I thought was worth trying out. Like so many things in MidjourneyLandia, I found the Tuner UI/UX to be pretty much terrible, and very difficult to tune in any kind of direction that made sense to me. I won’t do a full product tear-down here, because who cares. It was an interesting experiment, but I’m not sure worth the $30 USD I blew on it for the month. (I’m also sad that they made Dalle3 much suckier after the initial burst of awesome when it came out…)

The brainstorming sessions for the book took place in ChatGPT v4, but then I dumped the contents of that into Claude, which has a bigger context window, and I think better fiction-writing capacity still. I know how to work with it to get adequate results for these kinds of quick scattershot world-building books. It’s not earth-shattering fiction by any means, but taken as a whole, I think these make for pretty fun and readable ebook products. This book also thematically references another volume, which is told in a similar style, The Song Drive, as the generation ship Deliriant is equipped with one (a space engine that runs on musical energy inherent in the universe).

Here is the art preview for the book, via Gumroad:

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