Uncel is the 119th installment in the AI Lore books, which were recently featured in a Paris literary publication, Actualitté. Uncel follows the continuing adventures of the character/narrator sketched out in Relaxatopia, Anxietopia, and Conspiratopia. (These are also all available with some bonus items at a discount as part of the Topia Collection here; only 5 more copies of that bundle will ever be sold, btw.)

Uncel is the first new AI Lore book I’ve put together since January, which is when I started working with my French publisher, Typophilia. Now that the French print editions are starting to launch (starting with The Quatria Conspiracy), it felt like a good moment to go back to some new work.

Not having access to Midjourney anymore has also been a contributing factor in the slowdown (though, at the same time, it also inspired me to go back to painting, which has been really rewarding). The other AI image generators sometimes leave a lot to be desired, but I managed to put together an art set of 65 images in this book using Dalle3, Ideogram, Stable Diffusion and Playground AI. Possibly a Flux and a Leonardo or two might have snuck in, but I didn’t keep careful track of which are which, because really who cares.

The book’s title, Uncel, is a play on “incel” or involuntary celibate, someone who doesn’t have sex – not because they choose that, but because they can’t get any. Uncel imagines a world several steps beyond that, where the protagonist doesn’t even know what sex is. All they can see of their reproductive organs is a sort of blurry digitized haze, because they lack the premium subscription plans which would give them access to this level of user experience. The book is kind of a farce about the impossibility of getting “satisfaction” of several kinds, including through elaborate interactions with (possibly automated) customer service agents which go round and round in circles, ending in psychosis and dissolution – both perfectly logical terminal points in the advanced stage of the Kali Yuga depicted in this book. It’s bleak, but I like to think it’s a “fun” bleak!

Here’s a more vanilla blurb from ChatGPT:

In a future where life is governed by subscription plans, one user struggles to access an elusive upgrade: the experience of sex. Amid blurry visions and endless customer service loops, they question what it means to truly connect in a world where everything is controlled.

Incidentally, I don’t think I really used ChatGPT to help write any of this one. This book makes use heavily of Mistral, via Textsynth completions. There’s probably more to say here, but I’m just getting back into the swing of new books again. So the most important thing is just to get this one out the door and start the next. Enjoy!

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