Three Little Martians books in print on a wrought-iron table: O Segredo de Kweku, Verdelis Letter, and Dear Human, Welcome to the Little Martians World.
Writing · since 2020

Fiction writing

Most of my fiction happens inside one world: the Little Martians, future beings descended from all of Earth’s life, who keep our memory in a vast simulation called the Imaginarium.

The world began as clay in 2020 and grew into letters, songs, scripts, films, books and characters that people can talk to. Some of it I wrote alone, some with friends at Mars College, and some in conversation with language models. The last group has its own section below, with comments on the process.

As the years pass, the early experiments with AI assisted creative writing become all the more interesting to me. Vintage AI.

Stories
Cover: Little Martians and the Human Memorial Monument, by Vanessa Rosa. A glowing ceramic face on black.
2022

Little Martians and the Human Memorial Monument

Published by Untitled Frontier as the third story of the Logged Universe, 30 March 2022, with art and NFTs made with Gene Kogan

Dear Diana,

Please don’t be scared. The world and life you once knew is millions of your years and kilometres away. You are safe and a part of my collection. Humanity will continue to thrive thanks to you. I’ve made sure of it and I hope you will understand. Let me explain.

I know that as a human, you have limitations in understanding my perception of reality, but I’ve put quite some effort into translating my experience. Even expressing myself as an “I” is a stretch for “me”. You see, humans are our ancestors… One of many.

Read the story ⇢Untitled Frontier ⇢

Books

Adult and children’s books, in Portuguese and English. Each one has a page where it can be read from cover to cover.

The Little Martians Codex Read the whole book ⇢ Verdelis’ Letter Read the whole book ⇢ Kweku’s Secret Read the whole book ⇢ Diana’s World Read the whole book ⇢

Read them on the books page ⇢

Writing with other people
2022

Little Martians at Mars College

Experiments in collective storytelling with the people of Mars College, in the desert.

Little Martians at Mars 22 ⇢

The printed book: Little Martians, Interactive Storytelling Experiment.
2024

Little Martians on Kojii.ai

Interactive generative storytelling. Six characters, each from a real ceramic sculpture, made into image models and given language-model personalities. I set the world, its context and its rules; visitors prompt a character and the story goes where they take it. The project was shortlisted for the CVPR AI Art Gallery in 2024. The platform shut down before launch; the model moved to Eden.art, where some three hundred images were made. A selection became a book, each image paired with the prompt that summoned it.

Read the whole book ⇢ The project ⇢CVPR AI Art Gallery, 2024 ⇢

Experiments in AI-assisted creative writing

Since 2022 I have been writing with language models, to find out what they are good for and where they fail. Every text here is marked: what I wrote, what I gave the model as a prompt, and what the model generated.

2022

Memories from the early time of life on Mars

GPT-3, davinci family, probably text-davinci-002

An experiment with GPT-3. I wrote five first-person memories for the Little Martians as a guide, and the model continued in the same voice; then the same again for theories of where the Martians came from. Many of the outputs I then edited, as I learned to collaborate with the model. The page keeps it all, marked.

Read the whole experiment ⇢

2023

Talk to a Little Martian

Language models with personas, on Eden, with Gene Kogan

The first interactive storytelling experiment: an app where you typed a question and a Little Martian answered in their own voice, remembering what they had said before. Shown in Venice Beach, Brooklyn, Portugal and Burgundy in 2023.

Four characters, one question ⇢

2024

Dear Human, My Muse

ChatGPT, as a partner in discussion

Verdelis’s song, and the experiment I count as a success. Written with ChatGPT as a partner in discussion; the AI mostly helped with the rhymes.

The film, the song, and its first version ⇢

2024

Verdelis & Mycos, a duet

My first draft, then Suno, my editing and Claude

The script for the film: Verdelis, who believes in patient cultivation, against Mycos, the fungal mind who thinks chaos is how life learns. Sung and spoken, with the stage directions.

Read the duet ⇢

2024–2025

Verdelis.world

An agent on Eden, with Gene Kogan

The biggest of these experiments: Verdelis given her own site, her own voice and a film published every morning, written and made by the system itself. With the pipeline, three of the daily films, and what went wrong when nobody was disturbing it.

The whole experiment ⇢

2025

Verdelis’s Stories

Claude, most likely Sonnet 4.5

A story engine: a prompt that maps Verdelis’s mind as a dodecahedron of twelve faces and four triads, and sets the rules for one-minute stories in her voice. With the thirty-six stories collected in it, and what became of some of them in The Outer Membrane, 2026.

Read the engine and the stories ⇢

2026

The Outer Membrane

An image model on Eden

Verdelis’s stories rewritten as engraved letters, and a first version of Verdelia’s codex, for Marzipan’s fictional Mars College journal. Each page is one generated image: border, emblems and lettering together.

See the pages ⇢

The books ⇢ Little Martians ⇢ littlemartians.world ⇢