I just finished reading Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson. The book was inspired by the Arab Spring. It is one part Neuromancer and one part A Thousand and One Knights. While much of the heady optimism of The Arab Spring has dissipated, the book is still very interesting, great fun, and extremely visual. It leans in heavily on the optimistic side of technology. Here, you will not find the downside of Twitter or modern social media, but rather the liberating capabilities of those tools. One also finds djinn, effrits, and the magical desert culture of the Middle East. Parts of it remind me of the desert sequences in Declare, one of my favorite books.
If you’ve read other of my writing on AI, you know I am deeply of two minds about AI and its impact on artists. But simply not using it does not seem like the right answer to me. I experiment with it. I’ve built a jazz discovery system with it (a post for another day), and have used it to help me transcribe colonial-era American history documents (Cotton Mather and the Pirates).
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with AI to generate book cover ideas for my forthcoming novel, and Alif the Unseen is extremely visual, so I thought it might be fun to try out the newest version of Midjourney to visualize some of the interesting aspects of the book.
In short, the book pits Alif, a young hacker in an unnamed Arab country fighting against the crypto forces of the State security services. His allies are a young woman, a sheik, a rebel prince from the royal family, and an array of djinn, including the well-known Vikram the Vampire (e.g. Sir Richard Francis Burton’s telling).
Below find paired some quotes from the book, together with not-very-heavily-tweaked versions of what Midjourney spits out, when given quotes from the book. I have made no effort to convert the quotes from the book to a well-shaped prompt; rather, I was curious how well Midjourney would do when simply fed text from a book. As you can see, sometimes it is amazing, sometimes it missed essential details, but the images are always interesting.
He accessed the State mainframe almost without thinking. The firewalls that had been erected to protect their official intranet seemed trivial to him now, as decorative and breachable as the Old Quarter wall that surrounded their literal fortress, a tourist attraction. Alif felt as though he was looking down at it from a great height. Grids of code spread out within the wall, representing government e-mail accounts, municipal security, the City budget office. Largest of all, occupying an almost satirical amount of RAM in a well-cooled room full of blade servers somewhere, was the intelligence bureau.
As night drew on he began to dream. He imagined the columns of code on his computer screen were instead a tower of white stone, growing up and up as he typed. He adorned the tower with the climbing jasmine and dusty yellow hibiscus that grew in the garden of the little duplex in Baqara District. He imagined himself at the top of the tower, surveying his domain like a general. At midnight a golden foot appeared on the edge of his field of vision.
He worked steadily. His fingers knew what he needed to do before his mind did. Pieces of the fragmented Hollywood hypervisor were still useable; he plugged lines of the familiar code into the sheikh’s machine, watching with satisfaction as algorithmic towers grew before his eyes. Every so often he paused to reread a portion of the Alf Yeom, separating the frame story into two threads of code: Farukhuaz, the dark princess, became a set of Boolean algorithms; the nurse, her irrational counterpart, non-Boolean expressions.
It was a beast, though unlike any other animal Alif had ever encountered: massive, reddish, indistinct, a bloodstain on the pale paving stones. Fur hung down in clumps over the goatish pupils in its gas-blue eyes. There were no teeth in its primitive jaws; instead, row after row of knives receded into the darkness of its gullet. It was a child’s nightmare, the fantasy of a mind too innocent to encompass human evil, but capable of imagining something far worse. Alif heard a high, thin cry, and was mortified to realize he had made it.
They walked for what seemed to Alif like a very long time, though the altered paths of the sun and moon, which seemed to revolve around the sky without rising or setting, made it difficult to tell. A glimmer on the horizon was the first sign of the jinn city. As they grew closer, Alif saw slender pillars of the same mineral that made up the road, rising to some indefinite height above the dunes. They were illuminated by a light whose source was unclear and appeared to generate from within the pillars themselves, casting shadows of amber and pink across the dust. A large, arched gate was visible among the pillars, carved with geometric patterns resembling starbursts. The road ran beneath it, into the city itself.
Inside were long tables where a scattering of strange figures sat in conversation. There was a tall, slim, coal-orange individual who looked like a moving candle flame, two women with the heads of goats, and a creature the size of a large toad that sat on the table itself, gesticulating with a pair of fat glistening hands. Their voices rose in laughter and died down again, backlit by a bluish fire burning in a metal grate at one end of the room. The grate was molded to look like a man and a woman engaged in an act Alif himself had never performed. As he watched, unable to look away, the fire dancing behind the carvings seemed to animate them, bringing them to lurid life and throwing their images across the ceiling.
This particular image is evocative, but not particularly faithful to the description. For comparison, here is what Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro system generates:
I hope you enjoyed a little romp through Alif the Unseen.
And last, just for fun, an image with my own prompt, not drawn from the text of the book.
