Notes on Tiamat

Tiamat is book #125 in the AI Lore Books series. It follows on with more tales set in the Hyperion Storm/Dalton Trask neighborhood of the multiverse/latent space that these narratives exist in. (Also see: Continuity Codex, and Algorithm #5 – not available online yet)

More specifically, the book opens with President Storm announcing the dismantling and piece-by-piece sale of the Statue of Liberty, whose severed head he floats through the sky on a la Zardoz (which I feel like might deserve a rewatch).

At the same time in this book, Tiamat is the name of a Baconian utopia which was founded for the advancement of the sciences in the New World, and became corrupted, yadda yadda yadda.

Apart from the themes and I guess possibly too overt symbolism, the book stylistically is extremely fragmentary and at times borrows from a sort of pseudo-Burroughs cut-up thing to get its point across about the dismemberment of the goddess Tiamat. I found it fun anyway to put together. It is likely not everybody’s cup of tea, but it includes a little of everything, including a lot of good straight forward flash fiction slice of life thingies, and expository encyclopedia entries (“tell, don’t show”).

Overall text is a mixture of my originals, GPT-4o, a little o3-mini, Deepseek, whatever free Claude version number we’re at now (I think 2.something?), Mistral (both their official chat, and completions via Textsynth). I used the Lazarus text mixing deck for some of the more cut-up style stuff more near the end, though certain things that were like fragments and snippets were largely (I think) GPT-4.

Here’s the art preview:

Images are a mix of Recraft, Ideogram, Grok (which I think uses some Flux variant?), and a very few Dalle-3s (but OpenAI is lagging well behind on image gen at this point, imo). One of these in particular you can see in the preview above, but here’s a larger version, as I think it’s fun. This was in Recraft, I believe?

There’s kind of an unnameable convergence here for me of like this strange and also cheap but also poetic poignancy … idk best not to speak too plainly of the “mystery” in these things, so as not to puncture it.

This book took a really long time to come together (as these things go). I’m back up to counting these more in weeks than in days or hours, like I was hitting back in my stride, when these kinds of explorations were all knew, and I had not already covered the wide swath of ground that I have by now. To keep this circus going now takes a different quality and depth of inquiry than what it did previously to keep it still fresh and interesting for me. For you, the reader, of course, ymmv. At least you can’t say I didn’t warn you…