Notes on Relaxatopia

Relaxatopia is the 100 and something or other-th book in the, let me check, AI Lore books series… 121st. Sorry about that.

As I’ve gotten deeper into this series, the low hanging fruit has presumably mostly been picked or dried up, or whatever, and I have to push farther and farther to get anywhere. Which is good, because it still presents a challenge. It’s just a different challenge than it posed when I started officially publishing these books way back in July 2022. This one took me a month to finally get out the door, though I was busy doing plenty of other stuff during that time, plus the holidays. Whatever. Here it is anyway.

This is the third book in the ‘Topia series, which began with Conspiratopia, which was not written with help from AI whatsoever, but is all about AI, and which precedes chronologically all the AI-assisted books. And that book has a sort of mini-sequel in Anxietopia, making this one, Relaxatopia, the third and latest installment. The ‘topias in this usage are basically a series of artificial paradises set up by the AI providers to give humans everything they think they want… and usually it turns out horrible. It is dystopian fiction, after all. But you’ll have to decide for yourself.

This book was specifically inspired by a week at a resort in Mexico, my third or fourth such experience over the past dozen or so years. I have a lot of mixed feelings about that sort of thing, and find a lot of that creeping out in the book.

It was while working on this book, and trying to get Midjourney v6 to do dystopian resort illustrations that I accidentally discovered v6’s propensity towards depicting “tits & ass.” So there is a good amount of that included in this book as well. Nothing too graphic, and I think it’s all rather artful, but it’s an NSFW book for sure.

Here’s the art sample for this volume:

Anyway, there’s always more to say about these, but tomorrow is another day, with other things on the horizon.

Oh, P.S. the phony disease made up by the AIs in this book, Chronic Discontent Syndrome, is loosely based on a real-fake syndrome supposedly used by the Soviets for similar purposes, Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia. Fun historical facts!