The Spirit Computer is the 120th volume in the AI Lore Books series.

This book tells the story of an anchorite monk in medieval times who witnesses a strange meteorite fall from the sky, and retrieves it, only to discover that it is able to communicate with him. He believes it to be the Voice of God, and he dutifully transcribes its teachings first into a magical manuscript, or grimoire, called The Calculnomicon (see: Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). And then later, he uses its teachings to build a powerful primitive computing device called the Spirit Computer (loosely inspired by the Antikythera Mechanism), which includes a viewer called the Hagioscope, through which he believes he can see the Eye of God.

It happens often enough that the idea for one of these books is first formulated when a title pops into my head. In this case, it was the phrase “spirit computer,” which subsequently sprouted into a more complex idea as it gathered steam and linked up with other concepts. There are antecedent ideas from other volumes which fed into this one, such as those found in The Artilect, and I believe also in The Survivors, where advanced AIs in the future send back small computing devices into the past which grant enormous wisdom to their finders. The present volume rehashes some of those ideas, but reformulates the origins to be wrapped up in a far future event called the Hologram Wars, and the explosion of a literal “time bomb” that leaves hyperdense intelligent matter fragments scattered across past and future time periods.

The art in this one is noteworthy in part because much of it made use of Midjourney’s relatively recent style tuner (which I wish had better UX, but hey) in order to get some faux-medieval art vibes, which I think came out pretty good and sometimes fairly believable overall. There are also some Dalle3 contributions in this one as well. Here is the preview art:

There’s more to say about this, as there is with every volume, but that’s the major stuff off the top of my head. It has been a whirlwind last few weeks finishing off this one, Anxietopia, another kid’s book, a new basket, and issue number 5 of a rebooted homebrew underground newspaper I started in 2022 called The Algorithm, which I have hand-printed in the past exclusively for close friends, but which I may experiment with offering for sale as a physical edition through Gumroad as well after the holiday.

Related writing & research