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About This Textbook

Publication Date: April 1st, 2026

Welcome From Sparkle the Unicorn

Good day, colleagues. Welcome to the interactive intelligent textbook Unicorns and Other Mythical Beasts: An Essential Guide to Creatures That Definitely Exist and the AI Technologies That Will Improve Them. My name is Sparkle, and I will be your guide throughout this entirely serious academic endeavor. I will introduce each chapter, share observations that the data makes unavoidable, give tips that are always distracting and occasionally useful, offer the occasional word of measured encouragement, and celebrate your achievements if you ever reach the end of the chapter. Let me be perfectly clear: unicorn literacy has never been more important.

Why This Book

Over the past two years, the author has used generative AI to produce more than 70 interactive intelligent textbooks on subjects ranging from graph algorithms to college biology. Each one takes roughly one afternoon to generate. This rate of production has not gone unnoticed by friends, colleagues, and innocent bystanders on LinkedIn, some of whom have begun to suspect the author may have a problem.

This book is the author's response. Rather than deny the accusation, he has leaned into it — producing yet another interactive intelligent textbook, this time about creatures that do not exist, technologies that may never work, and an education system that has formed 47 committees to study whether AI is worth forming a committee about.

The 19 chapters use mythical beasts as allegories for the absurdities of modern technology culture. Unicorns stand in for overhyped startups. Dragons represent disruptive technologies that keep accidentally automating everyone's jobs. Ostriches represent institutions that have decided the best response to technological change is to pretend it isn't happening. The satirical targets include AI hype, education's refusal to adapt, quantum computing's perpetual five-year timeline, blockchain's energy consumption, and the recursive absurdity of an AI-generated textbook about AI-generated content.

Some of the stories are based on real events. Some are complete fantasy. The reader is invited to determine which is which. Good luck.

How to Use This Book

This textbook is designed for self-paced study, ideally accompanied by a stuffed unicorn for moral support. The book includes several types of resources:

  • 19 Chapters across 5 units covering unicorn history, AI hype, education resistance, job displacement, and technology fantasies
  • Interactive MicroSims embedded in chapters — browser-based simulations including a unicorn timeline, AI feature generator, job displacement calculator, hype cycle roller coaster, population dynamics model, and vaporware field guide
  • 12 Graphic Novels featuring mythical beasts navigating workplace situations that will feel painfully familiar
  • Quizzes at the end of each chapter, where the wrong answers are sometimes more true than the right ones
  • Glossary with terms you never knew you needed, defined with dictionary precision and zero irony
  • FAQ addressing questions about unicorn impact on society and AI's ability to write better satire than humans
  • Learning Graph visualizing 140 concept dependencies across the course
  • Search available from any page using the search bar in the top navigation

The Learning Graph visualizes how concepts connect across chapters. If you want to explore non-linearly or check prerequisites for a specific topic, start there.

About the Author

Dan McCreary is a retired AI researcher with too much time on his hands. After three decades helping Fortune 100 organizations reason over massive datasets — including founding the Generative AI Center of Excellence at Optum and building one of the world's largest healthcare knowledge graphs (over 25 billion vertices) — he now channels his considerable free time into generating interactive intelligent textbooks at a rate that alarms his family and mystifies his neighbors.

He is the co-author of Making Sense of NoSQL (Manning Publications), the founding chair of the NoSQL Now! conference, and a person who has produced over 70 intelligent textbooks in roughly the time it takes most authors to outline one. You can visit the Intelligent Textbooks Case Studies to see the evidence. He has been a STEM volunteer since 2014, which provides a thin veneer of respectability to what is otherwise a compulsive hobby.

This textbook is what happens when a retired AI researcher discovers that generative AI can produce an entire interactive textbook in an afternoon and decides there is no reason to stop.

Selected Credentials

  • B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Carleton College
  • M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota
  • MBA coursework at the University of St. Thomas
  • Patent holder in semantic search and ontology management techniques
  • Advocate for large-scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph adoption across healthcare and education
  • Long-time promoter of accessible, low-cost AI-powered learning experiences
  • Creator of over 70 interactive intelligent textbooks, a number that continues to grow at a rate that concerns his family

How to Cite This Book

APA (7th edition)

McCreary, D. (2026). Unicorns and other mythical beasts: An essential guide to creatures that definitely exist and the AI technologies that will improve them. https://dmccreary.github.io/unicorns/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. Unicorns and Other Mythical Beasts: An Essential Guide to Creatures That Definitely Exist and the AI Technologies That Will Improve Them. https://dmccreary.github.io/unicorns/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. Unicorns and Other Mythical Beasts: An Essential Guide to Creatures That Definitely Exist and the AI Technologies That Will Improve Them. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/unicorns/.

BibTeX

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@book{mccreary2025unicorns,
  title     = {Unicorns and Other Mythical Beasts: An Essential Guide to Creatures That Definitely Exist and the AI Technologies That Will Improve Them},
  author    = {McCreary, Dan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://dmccreary.github.io/unicorns/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook. April Fool's edition.}
}

To cite a specific chapter, append the chapter number and title — for example:

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 5: Deer in the headlights: When disruption comes knocking. In Unicorns and other mythical beasts: An essential guide to creatures that definitely exist and the AI technologies that will improve them. https://dmccreary.github.io/unicorns/chapters/05-deer-in-the-headlights/