Introducing Long Exodus

Climate fiction short stories illustrated by AI image generators

This is Long Exodus, a series of illustrated vignettes exploring our future living in a diaspora from our climate changed world.

This project is an attempt to imagine our fast emerging scenarios of droughts and floods, excess and scarcity. To explore the points of friction between different layers of nature, governance, and infrastructure.

The stories should have some hope to them, or at least be pragmatic enough to not be outright dystopian. Grounded in what the world feels like now, but extrapolated out.

It’s also an excuse to kick the tyres on AI generated imagery: to see how well they work at picturing worlds and narratives, while trying not to veer too much into the tacky laziness that makes up most of what they’re used for. After spending some time prompting shallow novelty, I was tired of what I was seeing from both my own creations and from almost everyone else.

That’s not to say that there won’t be the occasional dip into a cheesy sci-fi trope — prompting images with Midjourney gives the feeling that it’s feedstock was front covers from every high and low genre — but I’ll try to elevate or use sparingly.

I’m hoping that by using (human written) fiction, the sense of disposability from most of what constitutes AI art will be countered. This project wouldn’t exist were it not for the ease of use of bringing forth detailed and well structured imagery weren’t so damn easy. But I feel it needs grounding to give it purpose. I’m hoping the stories from different points of our climate future can do that.