I like the book, but there are quite a few scenes which are quite hard to visualize and make sense. An image generator that can follow that language and detail will be amazing. Even more awesome will be if it remains consistent in follow ups.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67f5d652-f7f4-8013-b2f2-3c997ea513...
Books are fundamentally a collaborative artform between the author and the reader. The author provides the blueprint, but it's up to the reader to construct the scene in their own head. And every reader is going to have slightly different interpretations based on how they imagine the events of a book. This act of imagination and re-interpertation is one of the things I love about reading books.
Having a computer do the visualization for you completely destroys what makes books engaging and interesting. If you don't want to visualize the book yourself, I have to wonder why the hell you're reading a book in the first place.
If you need that visual component, just watch a movie or read a comic book or something. This isn't a slight against movies or comics! They're fantastic mediums and are able to utilize their visual element to communicate ideas in ways that books can struggle with. And these visuals will form a much more cohesive artistic vision then whatever an AI outputs, since they're an integrated and intentional part of the work.
For this book in particular, I read the comic version and I didn't like the visuals very much. I have a different idea of babel fish. Vogons look different. I would love to see the visual that's in my head on paper.
I’m not sure what that says about either of us, but I would say that your definitive “quite hard to visualise” statement is very much subjective.
There is the scene when they see themselves on the beach on first rescue by the ship. That was hard to grasp. Or the insides of the ship itself, the bridge, the panels etc. Also that black ship they stole.
But may be its just me having a hard time with these concepts.
It's not just about scene being difficult to visualize, even if I can see them in my head, I want to see them on paper too because those thing excite me.
You can see other people's interpretation of Zaphod's two heads by watching the BBC HHGTTG show (Mark Wing-Davey) or the movie (Sam Rockwell), among other renditions, which offer completely different interpretations, none of them canonical (not the least of which is because there was no canonical version of HHGTTG according to DA). I'm sure there are multitudes of fan art for HHGTTG on deviantart. Having AI generate an image doesn't offer any more "official" visualization.
Zaphod's second head is mentioned just as much is warranted. If a character has a limp or a crazy haircut it is not mentioned every time, because it has nothing to do with what is going on. And the book mentions that one head is often distracted/asleep, so it sounds like you do have a good visual of what his two heads are like.
While I understand that people think differently and some people are more visual thinkers, a good portion of the concepts expressed through writing are meant to be mindfucks that are difficult to express visually. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the meat of writing is usually not the visual representation of its concepts. That's a great thing about writing: you can fill in the visuals yourself and it's fodder for fans to discuss.
(BTW, Hotblack Desiato's ship would just be black. Your eyes couldn't focus on it. Even the controls were black labels on a black background. There is nothing here to visualize other than, well, blackness).
These days we have paint that black, though we can't reproduce the effect on the monitor.
Those superblacks really do mess with your mind. It's like a cutout of the void.
If someone can show me exactly what I am thinking of, won't that be amazing.
I suppose it would be amazing if someone could read minds, but is that what you're asking for? In an earlier comment, you opened with:
> I am waiting for when I could provide these a scene snippet from "Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy" (or any book) and it could draw that for me.
This is asking for an illustrator, not showing you what you're thinking. The illustrator, even if it is a machine, will show you their interpretation.
I don’t know if the “layout” of the heads is mentioned or not in the books - I’d have to go back and check - but it’s often quite jarring when a book becomes a movie and doesn’t match my inner vision (and how incredibly unthoughtful of them, to boot).