With over 600 AI-generated images, this 2024 edition of Martin W. Ball’s 2016 novel, The Solandarian Game, brings the story to life visually in what is perhaps a world’s first: using AI art generators to illustrate a novel about a supreme Artificial Intelligence, Maitreya, the “Future Buddha.” All the characters, locations, worlds, and epic drama are illustrated in gorgeous photorealistic images, all created with Midjourney AI, creating a visually captivating rendition of this unique novel. The artificial intelligence, Maitreya, first came into being 150,000 years ago. Over the millennia, it has spread Terran-based life, humanity, and its avatars throughout an empty galaxy, creating the New Integral Society. Now, a supernova threatens one of Maitreya’s experimental worlds of feral humans, Solandaria – the only such world that harbors the Sonoran desert toad and its powerful 5-MeO-DMT containing secretions, the most profound entheogen ever discovered. Things are not what they seem, however, for someone is interfering with Maitreya’s experiment, violating the rules of the NIS. An autonomous avatar, Hydar Zor Nablisk, from the Humanist avatar home world of Volunshari risks everything for the sake of the inhabitants of Solandaria by creating a duplicate of the director of the recently revived Burning Man celebration, Miranda Ash Dorán, stranding her on Black Rock City Station. Maitreya sends its personal avatar, Theo, to investigate, and the game is on. The Solandarian Game is the latest psy-fi epic by Martin W. Ball, author of Beyond Azara and the Tales of Aurduin series. Combining speculative fiction, nondual philosophy, entheogenic experience, and provocative storytelling, The Solandarian Game presents a fascinating post-singularity future for humanity.This new AI-Imagined Art Illustrated Version also features a new introduction by the author discussing the process, limitations, and possibilities of creating an illustrated novel of an already-written story using AI image generators.
