Mysterious Plasmoids is the 124th installment in the AI Lore Books series. It is the first book I’ve done in the “Mysterious…” series in quite some time, and is another ‘ripped from the headlines’ hot take on what is happening with the drone/orb situation that is supposedly happening globally (I’ve not seen any anomalies first hand, myself). It also continues in another thematic subset of my books that relate to various aspects of UAP/UFO phenomena. This one heavily references other books in that cluster, if non-linearly.
There’s a vivid dream description of mine which fellow blogger Ran Prieur documented way back in 2005 here. In it I dreamt of a hyper-nationalist/fascist future US where police sirens played the song “America, the Beautiful,” and aliens had invaded in the United States… Excerpt below:
New York City had been divided into northern and southern zones, via a gigantic wall and forcefield. The southern half still had people living and working in it. But the northern half was completely off-limits. The official story was that aliens (space, not illegal) had taken over the northern half of the city, and the rest of the United States northward.
We knew, however, that this officially story was largely a fabrication. But that was all we knew. We had to roam about the lower half of the city, trying to find a passage to the north. And we had to do so without arousing any suspicions, which was an extremely difficult task. No one in the city would answer questions or help us.
And the police presence was total. You had to keep moving at all times. Any group of people who were stopping to talk or otherwise congregate was quickly spotted and broken up by patrolling police. […]
The police also had flying discs which they sent out after you. They were autonomous electronic devices which hovered and would track you as you ran. Once they were within range, they would fire an electric bolt at you to incapacitate you until officers arrived. The discs were called “temperplexes,” and they were all apparently controlled by larger motherships which flew higher and basically looked like UFO’s.
I actually continued that dream and spun out more variations using AI and published it in an earlier volume called, The First Days of Panic. That book, however, takes it visually in a much more fascist police drone direction (which, hell, I wouldn’t rule out just yet), whereas this book more explores the notion of plasmoids as heretofore unrecognized forms of life, which have interacted with us in myriad ways throughout history and prehistory: something more like John Keel’s ultraterrestrials. Are we living in the timeline now of that dream? Maybe?
Whatever the true nature of the “real” drones/orbs/plasmoids/UFO/UAP stuff that is or isn’t going on in our skies is, I think, a little besides the point; the point is the search itself. The point is the looking, and trying to understand all possibilities, and fit the best bets that seem to match evidence from reality itself.
Or, you know, in this case, hyperreality. Images in this one were mostly made with Ideogram and Recraft, with some dabbling in Grok’s image gen, and screegrabs from Sora videos, plus some remove tool in Adobe Lightroom. Text is majority ChatGPT with many human edits and improvements, told in alternating chapters between “first person” accounts, and quasi scholarly essays. Art preview below:
I might experiment in a subsequent volume with trying to embed animated gifs or even short videos from Sora if I can get the technology working adequately to share them. Ebooks don’t seem well-suited to that kind of thing, due to file sizes, though. So we will see what’s actually still feasible.
I have a lot of horses in this particular race, but this quote from AP coverage just strikes me as wrong:
And what will happen when some of Jones’ casual fans who didn’t follow the news of the bankruptcy auction log on to Infowars in a few months only to find the Onion’s new creation? Probably not much, said Beran, who suggested it’s unlikely there’s much overlap between people attracted by conspiracy theories and those who want to mock them.
In my experience, there is actually a *great deal* of overlap between those two groups… But I think that’s not a drawback, that’s another thing in the plus column!
Misinformation and art intersect to explore and navigate the confusion between reality and fiction that typifies our times in the work of net artist Tim Boucher.
In works that run the gamut from books and hand-printed samizdat zines to the use of generative AI for video, text, and image-making, Boucher’s work uses hyperreality to delve into the murky shadows of the Uncanny Valley, evoking a weird, sometimes disorienting feeling of surfing the very edge of the collapse of meaning. Weaving together real and invented, human and AI elements to seamlessly blur the lines between them, Boucher exploits this chaos to create new semiotic spaces for radical meaning-making. Structurally, the work appropriates, satirizes, and detourns the forms and tropes of conspiracy theory, re-imagining them as a new form of art, and igniting them with the fuel of runaway AI.
While the contents of conspiracy theories often tend toward the ghoulish, harmful, or just plain wrong, they are inherently postmodern, acting as a vehicle for questioning established truths and power relationships—an activity which serves an important social function, if in many cases misguided in its ultimate application. Conspiracy theorists reject grand “official” narratives and instead create their own ad hoc temporary webs of meaning, challenging the legitimacy of the structures we rely on and deep beliefs previously taken for granted. The work asks big questions about whether there could be a way for art to reclaim this function of social critique that conspiracy theories currently embody in the popular consciousness, redirecting it towards more fruitful and creative ends?
The artist’s professional background in content moderation and censorship informs the work, at times borrowing from disinformation techniques observed in the field by state actors, repurposed as storytelling tools in open-ended creative networked narratives, and SEO manipulations to show how easily depictions of “reality” can be twisted and propagated. Misinformation is used here by the artist openly—not to deceive, but to reveal how fragile our systems for defining truth really are. The works expose how the artist’s role as propagandist, deploying “weaponized” artifacts to attempt to subversively actualize or undermine real or potential current or future states.
As a satirist working with the mode of the conspiracy theorist, the artist knowingly inhabits and exaggerates the conspiratorial narrative forms they aim to critique, imploding them from within. As the Onion’s amicus brief on parody put it, “Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it”—a technique central to this practice.
Inspired by Dada absurdity, the artist’s ‘Nevermades’—collections of AI-generated artworks appearing to involve famous museums and galleries—extend Duchamp’s readymades concept into the post-truth, remote-first digital age, challenging the idea that authenticity requires physical presence – or even actual existence in the first place. These imagined or “aspirational” artworks (like flooding the Guggenheim Museum, and filling it with willow trees and beavers) comment on the art world’s status symbols—galleries, exhibitions, facades and physical artifacts—that can now be artificially fabricated at scale, significantly challenging their value in an online world dominated by images.
The use of AI serves to heighten the inherent tensions in the work. AI is used consciously as both a force that flattens expression into sameness and conformity and as a tool to rebel against the algorithmic culture of likes, shares, and validation – by exploiting and exposing the outliers, anomalies, errors, and vulnerabilities of these technologies. By transparently incorporating AI, the work proudly wears the use of these technologies as a kind of “scarlet letter,” confronting head-on the stigma against its use in creative sectors, and reimagining it as a vehicle and medium all its own for artistic exploration. At the same time, it shines a light on the absurdities and limitations of these technologies, and holds a mirror up to our own evolving reactions to them.
Ultimately, this metamodernist body of work oscillates between the deadly serious and the dangerously stupid and absurd, revealing the fragile and easily manipulated nature of our information systems and the social and political systems which rely on them. The work encourages the audience to consider conspiracy theory as an unrecognized folk art form—provocative and dangerous, to be sure, but one in many ways much like any art or cultural movement that questions authority. It disrupts the established order, challenges accepted facts, and compels us to face the instability of the narratives we hold onto, and, in its best form, opens up the space for change how things are today into how they could be, how we would likek them to be.
AI, misinformation, conspiracy, and hyperreality converge here to ask a simple but potent question: what is real, and who gets to decide?
I was just looking around for examples of famous conspiracy theories that originated in Quebec. I believe that Project Blue Beam is likely to be one, in that Serge Monast seems to have been its inventor/discoverer (depending on your point of view). I didn’t find anything terribly new or interesting, so I asked Perplexity, which at first gave some really general results pulled from news sources of occurrences of conspiracy theory + Quebec in body text.
Then I started asking it about Blue Beam, and then finally about the Quatria Theory, since – technically – it largely originated in Quebec. I asked Perplexity in such a way that was pretty leading, something to the effect of “Didn’t the Quatria Theory originate in Quebec too?”
And it spit out this nicely polished LLM hallucination that I just adore:
You’re correct, the Quatria Theory or Quatria Conspiracy also originated in Quebec. Here are the key details about this conspiracy theory:
The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy
The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy is a Quebec-based conspiracy theory that claims the Earth is actually made up of four spheres or realms instead of just one. It was first proposed in the 1990s by Yvon Boudreau, a Quebec author and conspiracy theorist. According to Boudreau’s writings, the four realms are:
The physical/material realm we inhabit
An antimatter realm
A realm of pure energy
A realm of pure thought/consciousness
Boudreau claimed these four realms coexist and interact, with the higher realms able to influence and control the lower, material realm through psychic powers and advanced technology unknown to most humans. The theory alleges that a secret society of powerful individuals has knowledge of and access to these higher realms, allowing them to manipulate world events through mind control, weather manipulation, and other paranormal means in pursuit of a New World Order agenda.
While never gaining mainstream acceptance, the Quatria Theory found a following in some New Age and conspiracy circles in Quebec in the 1990s and 2000s. It blended ideas from quantum physics, ancient mythology, and various conspiracy theories about secret societies like the Illuminati. However, the theory has been widely dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience lacking any empirical evidence.
Critics have labeled it a complicated fantasy concocted to give a veneer of plausibility to long-standing conspiracy narratives about powerful cabals controlling humanity. So in summary, while not as well-known as theories like Project Blue Beam, the Quatria Conspiracy was another notable conspiracy originating from Quebec that attempted to merge fringe science, mysticism, and New World Order paranoia into an overarching narrative. Its creator Yvon Boudreau was an influential conspiracy theorist in the Quebec conspiracy milieu.
Reading this confused even me (a good sign), I was for a second like, wait, it’s actually Yvon Boudreau who invented this in the 90s?? I literally googled it just to make sure haha. But how can I know Google isn’t lying to me too? Top of the line AI technology, right here! What a cool future…
The book is 96 pages in A6 format (about the size of a cell phone, give or take – I wouldn’t know cause I don’t have one). From the publisher’s website:
Synopsis
Au cœur de notre passé lointain, enfoui sous les strates du temps, se cache un secret extraordinaire : l’existence d’une civilisation maritime oubliée, Quatria. Originaire d’un Antarctique paradisiaque, jadis havre de paix verdoyant, les énigmatiques quatriens dominaient les technologies de l’énergie cymatique et du voyage dimensionnel. Vivant en symbiose avec l’ensemble du vivant, ils ont bâti une société harmonieuse, jusqu’à ce qu’une série de cataclysmes planétaires d’ampleur inouïe vienne fragiliser leur civilisation, puis l’anéantir. Leur existence, dissimulée avec soin au cours des millénaires, est aujourd’hui révélée au grand jour pour la première fois, dévoilant un pan oublié de l’histoire de l’humanité.
Note de l’éditeur
Les Livres Mobiles sont une offre spéciale des éditions Typophilia, qui explorent les limites de la narration et de l’hyperréalité en utilisant conjointement les intelligences artificielles génératives et la créativité humaine. Dans le confort d’un petit livre de la taille de votre téléphone portable, voyez-les comme des livres anti-numériques.
It’s fun to see this come to fruition as I wrote this book some three years ago or so, before I started seriously exploring how I could integrate AI into my writing. That was a practice & also technology that would only mature about a year later when I started the AI Lore books in earnest.
So, technically, the original version of this book has no AI-assisted writing, which is another reason why it is numbered as #0 in this series. It’s the precursor which paints in broad strokes on the canvas of the mind using as colors other popular conspiracy theories, and dribs and drabs of legends and “cool ideas” picked up from here and there, and glued together into the Frankenstein monster that is the Quatria Conspiracy.
Much of it revolves around something I’ve been calling the Quatria Theory, which I made numerous weird bad AI videos for over the past few years, and here is just one short one to kick off the conversation:
The Quatria Theory posits, in short, that a prehistoric lost seafaring culture spread all around the globe from its base in Antarctica millions of years ago when it was a green paradise near the Equator.
Sounds far fetched? Well, enough people seem to have taken it to be true that multiple media outlets have taken it upon themselves to fact-check that related AI-images I made in this vein (for subsequent books) were not in fact depicting this very same lost civilization. OR WERE THEY AND IT’S ALL A BIG COVER UP??
Those are exactly the kinds of sometimes serious sometimes stupid rabbitholes that this book and the series where I used AI to elaborate on a lot of what started in this book pushes the reader into. It’s… not intended to be super serious writing. It is trashy, pulpy, throwaway, and fun in the way those things can be fun.
The original English version exists still as an ebook only. There are no images included in that version (though I might do an update sometime), but the French print-only version does have images. I’m not sure offhand how many, but I would call it a “copious” quantity. Many of the images are very pulp inspired. Like this example that I love:
These were all done in Dalle, asking for images in pulp sci fi styles. And it really nails some of them. The art in this book stylistically is really different than in most of the later volumes, which are generally more in the photographic direction (though not all). And that’s fine, because each book is its own reflection of conditions of its making. They are in a way their own meta-historical documents.
If I’m being totally honest though, the true origin of The Quatria Conspiracy is actually my first (only) full-length conventionally-written (no AI) novel, The Lost Direction. That book is epic fantasy, heavy on the world-building, makes use of frame stories to tell many smaller character’s tales throughout. Not many people read it. Not all the ones that did liked it.
In any event, the Quatria Conspiracy takes the more fictionally-framed elements of the novel, and re-casts them as quasi/pseudo-historical “non-fiction” – largely invented, cobbled together with other “real” conspiracy theories, and again heavy heavy dose of world-building. Some would say too much. In fact, there’s no plot. It literally, as they say in the Literary Review of Canada article linked above, “reads like a textbook.” This time intentionally. This time leaning into the very opposite of the writers’ dictum that one must “show don’t tell.” This book tells, but now it has some fun pictures to do the showing too. And they really help set the mood in the French version. It’s great. I have a strong feeling it’s going to be a fun little book to hold in your hand, and like, read under the covers with a flashlight.
There’s probably a great deal more to say about this book, and some of the origins of the idea of Quatria and its major personages and metadivinities in the Early Clues, LLC oeuvre… but I’ll save that all for another time.
I’ve been teasing references to this for a while now, but it is now finally official, the website of Typophilia, my print publisher in France, is now live. It has been fun working with them behind the scenes to translate all of my books and publish them for French audiences, since January. They really get my vision of using AI to critique (and satirize) AI, and society’s relationship with technology more broadly. The print versions of the books are really well designed to capture the pulp sci fi serial feel I have been emulating, and are going to look sharp in print.
We’re starting with French version of The Quatria Conspiracy as book #0 because it is effectively the origin for a lot of what followed in the later AI Lore Books series. English readers can still purchase ebook versions on Gumroad (not sold anywhere else), but no print yet.
As we get rolling, I will try to go back through and write a “Notes on” piece for each volume, as I found the process of writing those – which I only commenced maybe half or two thirds of the way in – really helpful for my own reflection if nothing else. I don’t want to give away all the whatzits in each volume, because it’s best if readers form their own conclusions about what’s going on. But it’s fun to be able to give selective sign posts along the way.
Anyway, big thank you and congratulations to everyone at Typophilia, and looking forward to where we can take this adventure together!
I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet (it’s looong & only part 1!), but I had an absolutely great time filming it with Milo. Also watch for my special reveal:
As I near some publication milestones, I went back through and created an “official” (as official as anything here, that is) numerical ordering for all the Lost Books & AI Lore books series (the two bleed together).
Under this revised numbering, Relaxatopia actually becomes #118, and not #121 as I had mistakenly written in the past. Why the discrepancy? There’s one early book I took off the market, which was still impacting numbering, but now is excluded. And I was accidentally counting the two free books, Postcards from Quatria, and Postcards from Dystopia, which are not themselves original volumes, but compilations from the first chapters of other volumes. Those two are now also excluded.
Official numbering starts with #1 – Mysterious Stonehenge, which was the very first of the AI Lore books series and proceeds from there now in a chronological publish order, excluding the items remarked upon above.
Since none of them were AI-assisted, and they were all written before, and yet they all strongly impact the rest of the series, I have listed here the full-length novel (Lost Direction), the novella (Conspiratopia), and the free-wheeling pseudo-conspiracy theory diatribe (Quatria Conspiracy) as kinds of prequels to the rest of the series.
Found this piece from July 2022 by Cory Doctorow, where he talks about an author who was apparently a protege of Philip K. Dick’s who I never heard of – Tim Powers.
In it, he brings up an oft-repeated trope regarding “dangerous” fictions, a pet topic of mine:
“The Powers method is the conspiracist’s method. The difference is, Powers knows he’s making it up, and doesn’t pretend otherwise when he presents it to us. […]
The difference between the Powers method and Qanon, then, is knowing when you’re making stuff up and not getting high on your own supply. Powers certainly knows the difference, which is why he’s a literary treasure and a creative genius and not one of history’s great monsters.”
As popular as this type of argument is (and Douglas Rushkoff trots out something similar here and here), I personally find it to be overly simplistic and a bit passé.
First of all, I would argue that all writers – by necessity – must get “high on their own supply” in order to create (semi) coherent imaginal worlds and bring them to fruition for others to enjoy. Looking sternly at you here, Tolkien. In fact, perhaps the writers who get highest on their own supply are in some cases the best…
Second, no one arguing in favor of this all of nothing position (fiction must be fiction must be fiction) seems to have taken into account the unreliable narrator phenomenon in fiction.
Wikipedia calls it a narrator whose credibility is compromised:
“Sometimes the narrator’s unreliability is made immediately evident. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to the character’s unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story’s end. In some cases, the reader discovers that in the foregoing narrative, the narrator had concealed or greatly misrepresented vital pieces of information. Such a twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator’s unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.”
My point is that the un/reliability of the “narrator” can extend all the way out through to the writer themself. (And what if the reader turns out to be unreliable?)
Can we ever really know for certain if a writer “believed” that thing x that they wrote was wholly fictional, wholly non-fictional, or some weird blend of the two? Do we need to ask writers to make a map of which elements of a story are which? Isn’t that in some sense giving them more power than they deserve?
Moreover, if the author is an unreliable narrator (and to some extent every subjective human viewpoint isalways an unreliable narrator to some degree), how can we ever trust them to disclose to us responsibly whether or not they are indeed unreliable? Short answer is: we can’t. Not really.
This is one of those “turtles all the way down” arguments, in which (absent other compelling secondary evidence) it may be difficult or sometimes impossible to strike ground truth.
All of this boils down for me to the underlying argument of whether one must label fictional works as fiction, and if not doing so is somehow “dangerous.”
“In the Middle Ages, books were perceived as exclusive and authoritative. People automatically assumed that whatever was written in a book had to be true,” says Professor Lars Boje…
It’s an interesting idea, that structurally the phenomenon of the book was so rare and complex that by virtue of its existence alone, it was conceived of as containing truth.
“
Up until the High Middle Ages in the 12th century, books were surrounded by grave seriousness.
The average person only ever saw books in church, where the priest read from the Bible. Because of this, the written word was generally associated with truth.”
That article alludes to an invisible “fiction contract” between writer and reader, which didn’t emerge as a defined genre distinction until perhaps the 19th century. They do posit a transition point through in the 12th, but don’t back it up by any evidence therein of a “fiction contract.”
“The first straightforward work of fiction was written in the 1170s by the Frenchman Chrétien de Troyes. The book, a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, became immensely popular.”
HistoryToday.com – another site whose credibility I cannot account for – seems to agree with pinpointing that genre of Arthurian romance as being linked to the rise of fiction, though pushes it back a few years to 1155, with Wace’s translation of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The whole piece is an excellent read, so I won’t rehash it here, but quote:
“This is the literary paradigm which gives us the novel: access to the unknowable inner lives of others, moving through a world in which their interior experience is as significant as their exterior action.”
They suggest that fiction – in some form like we might recognize it today – had precursor conditions culturally that had to be met before it could arise, namely that the inner lives of people mattered as much as their outward action.
“It need hardly be said that the society which believes such things, which accedes to – and celebrates – the notion that the inner lives of others are a matter of significance, is a profoundly different society from one that does not. There is an immediately ethical dimension to these developments: once literature is engaged in the (necessarily fictional) representation of interior, individuated selves, who interact with other interior, individuated selves, then moral agency appears in a new light. It is only in the extension of narrative into the unknowable – the minds of others – that a culture engages with the moral responsibility of one individual toward another, rather than with each individual’s separate (and identical) responsibilities to God, or to a king.”
It’s interesting also here to note that, A) the King Arthur stories did not originate with Chretien de Troyes or Geoffrey of Monmouth, and B) many people ever since still believe them to be true today to some extent.
Leaving that all aside, one might also ask regarding my own work, well isn’t this all just a convoluted apologia for the type of writing I’m doing? Absolutely, and why not articulate my purpose. You can choose to believe me or decide that I am an unreliable narrator. It’s up to you. I respect your agency, but I also want to play on both the reader’s and the author’s (myself) expectations about genres and categories. These are books which take place squarely in the hyperreal after all, the Uncanny Valley. They intentionally invite these questions, ask you to suspend your disbelief, and then cunningly deconstruct it, only to reconstruct it and smash it again later – and only if you’re listening.
Further, as artists I believe our role and purpose is to some extent to befuddle convention, and ask questions that have no easy answers. Yes, this will cause some uneasiness, especially among those accustomed to putting everything into little boxes, whose contents never bleed or across. Some people might even worry if it’s “dangerous” to believe in things that aren’t factual. Is it? I think the answer is sometimes, and it depends. But it largely depends on your agency as the reader, and what you do with it in real life.
He is the very definition of the unreliable narrator, whose labels of fact of fiction likely do not accord with consensus reality on many major points.
The video below is a good, if a bit annoying, take-down of many of Cramer’s claims, though unfortunately I think leans rather too heavily on deconstructing his body language, when his words alone are damning enough (btw, looks like the George Noory footage comes from an interview he did for his show Beyond Belief):
The question remains: is this an example of a “dangerous” fiction?
To understand that, I tend to think in terms of risk analysis, in which we might try to estimate:
Feinberg’s defines harm as “those states of set-back interest that are the consequence of wrongful acts or omissions by others” (Feinberg 1984)
Is saying you spent 17 years on Mars a “wrongful act or omission?” Perhaps. But as the Stanford article points out, actually defining what is or isn’t in someone’s interests is incredibly squishy.
In Cramer’s case, perhaps it is willfully and wrongfully deceptive to say the things he is saying. Do we have a moral or legal responsibility to always tell the truth? What about when that prevarication leads to financial loss in others?
In Cramer’s case, according to the second video linked above, he does seem to ask people for money – both in funding creation of a supposedly holographic bio-medical bed which can regrow limbs, and in the form of online psionics courses and one-on-one consultations.
But is it wrongful if the buyers/donators have agency, and the ability to reasonably evaluate his claims on their own?
Wikipedia’s common-language definition of fraud seems like it could apply here:
“…fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.”
Is Cramer a fraud? Is he a liar? I wondered here if Cramer might have a defamation case against the YouTube author referenced above, who calls him a pathological liar. But last time I checked, truth is an absolute defense against defamation claims. That is, the commonly accepted truth we agree on as a society – more or less – is that Mars is uninhabited, and there is no Secret Space program, etc. So if it went to court, it seems like the defamation claim would not have a leg to stand on.
Of course, it’s *possible* it’s all truth, and what we call consensus reality is based on a massive set of lies itself that is very different from ‘actual’ reality. But that’s not how courts work.
What if Cramer included disclaimers like you might see on tarot card boxes, or other similar novelty items, “For entertainment purposes only?” It depends what authority we’re trying to appeal to here: a court of law, the court of public opinion, or one reader’s experience of a particular work. Each of those might see the matter in a different light, depending on their viewpoint.
In my case, I include disclaimers regarding the inclusion of AI generated elements. I leave it up to the reader to try to determine A) which parts, and B) what the implications of AI content even are. Should they be trusted?
My position, and the one which I espouse throughout, is that – for now – AI is an unreliable narrator. Making it about on par with human authors in that regard. Are the fictions it produces “dangerous?” Must we label them “fictions” and point a damning finger at their non-human source?
In some ways, my books are both an indictment of and celebration of AI authorial tools, and even full-on AI authorship (which I think we’re some ways away from still). To know their dangers, we must probe them, and expose them thoughtfully. We must see them as they are – as both authors and readers – warts and all. And decide what we will do with the risks and harms they may pose, and how we can balance all that with an enduring belief and valorisation of human agency.
Because if we can’t trust people to make up their own minds about things they read, we run the real risk of one of the biggest and most dangerous fictions of all – that we would be better off relying on someone else to tell us what’s ‘safe’ and therefore good, and trust them implicitly to keep away anything deemed ‘dangerous’ by the authority in whom we have invested this awesome power.
Yesterday brought the first review of my latest book, Conspiratopia, via a blogger in Croatia who runs a book review WordPress site called Soph’s Book World.
Here’s a direct link to the review, an archived version, and a copy on Goodreads. Since it’s a short review (and a short book!), I thought it appropriate to copy the whole thing here for future reference. Soph’s Book World gave the book 4/5 stars:
I must admit satire is not my usual pick (as a matter of fact, I haven’t read something like this since high school), but, as shallow as it might sound, that gorgeous cover drew me in. And I was pleasantly surprised.
Our main character is just a normal dude, jobless, living with his mother and playing games all day, and he doesn’t mind it that much. However, when he stumbles upon a great job, which is taking surveys for a bunch of money, of course he doesn’t decline. So what if he has to give out a bunch of his personal info, at least he got free VR glasses and a pizza! But soon he finds out it would’ve been better if he signed a deal with the devil himself.
This was such an interesting book and definitely a breath of fresh air in comparison to my usual romances and fantasies. I would say if you’re also like me and don’t really know much about satire (or conspiracy theories), you might enjoy this.
This definitely made me think of myself, as I also do surveys for money in my free time and I also have all those apps where you spend hours upon hours playing games for a few cents. So I just might not be that different from our main character lol.
To summarize, this was a very interesting and quick read and even though it might seem as a harmless fictional story, it has a deeper meaning. The way you portray it comes to you. I quite enjoyed it and if you think this is the content you might like, definitely pick it up!
Very nice review, and it’s heartening to hear that the reviewer liked it, despite not being too steeped in satire as a genre, or conspiracy theories. I hope to have a few other bloggers who will publish reviews as well in the coming weeks.
If you’re a blogger, podcaster, or social media influencer who would like a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know. You can contact me at the Lost Books site.
