Nedan en novell skriven med bistånd av en algoritm... Se:
https://www.wired.com/2017/12/when-an-algorithm-helps-write-science-fiction/
"Two researchers named Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke have spent the past few
years developing software that analyzes literary databases. Their program can
identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and
if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished
you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great
stories have in common.
That’s where I come in: I write stories for a living. (My last one was about
werewolf billionaires. It was fiction.) And I’ve watched technology infiltrate
countless trades and crafts, oftentimes improving how people do their jobs, all
while passing storytellers by. Where’s the technology that can make me better
at my job? Where’s the computational system that will optimize my prose?
Hammond and Brooke agreed to collaborate with me on a simple experiment: Can an
algorithm help me write a better story? I began by giving them a collection of
my 50 favorite sci-fi stories—a mix of golden-age classics and some more recent
stuff. (We decided I’d write a science-fiction piece, both for the obvious
reasons and because sci-fi is easy to identify.) They used their program to
compare my stories to a mass of other stories. First they came back to me with
a series of stylistic guidelines that would make my story as much like the
samples as possible—things like there had to be four speaking characters and a
certain percentage of the text had to be dialog. Then they sent me a set of 14
rules, derived from a process called topic modeling, that would govern my
story’s main topics and themes. All I had to do was start writing."
Och här är novellen:
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THE MACHINES sat empty in the dark. Only a single light was on when Anne and Ed
entered. A lone searcher was staring at the Other planet1, his face
half-swallowed by the viewer, and the empty banks of blank screens2 sloped into
the room’s vague emptiness.
“Profitable and marketable,” Ed said. “I cannot stress that enough.”
“Profitable and marketable,” Anne murmured in agreement.
The man at the viewer sucked out his face with a faint squelch and, with no
acknowledgment of either Anne or Ed, began to pack up as quickly as possible.
Anne had overdressed for her first day, obviously. Ed was night supervisor, but
he was wearing blue-and-green overalls. The guy at the viewer was in
head-to-toe sweats. His sallow eyes were exhausted3. He emanated a grotesque
odor of off-brand bleach, and it burned the inside of Anne’s nostrils. And she
was wearing her best outfit, the pencil-skirt outfit she’d bought for her
dissertation defense.
“Once upon a time,” Ed continued, “people were interested in the Other world
just because it was another world. There was discovery. Then there was building
the telescopes, carrying the mercury to the translunar observatories,
constructing the antigravity bases, the discs within discs of whirling silver
the size of cities to capture the light.”
The sallow man Anne was replacing misted the inside of the viewer with
antiseptic spray and gently rubbed the screen down with a paper towel. Nodding
curtly to each of them in turn, he half-jogged out the door. They were
apparently not to be introduced. Her coworker couldn’t wait to be gone.
“If you’re curious, go to the archives. I know, you’re a full prof, full
xenologist. I know you’ve spent 10 years in the archives already, but you’ve
got four hours tonight, well, three hours and 42 minutes. The archives have a
hundred million hours cross-referenced. Your job is to keep looking to find
something so we can justify keeping the lights on here.”
“I understand.”
“This light here,” he said, tapping the lamp.
The glow from the viewer that no one was looking into unnerved Anne. The Other
world, 1,564 light-years away, was flowing brightly4 and glamorously5 into the
machine, unobserved, while Ed gave what must be his boilerplate orientation
speech.
“Nobody cares. That’s the thing to remember. While you’re here, I’ll be making
phone calls to the South China coast begging for cash. Help me out. Keep the
lights on here to keep an eye on there. That’s our motto now.”
“Curiosity isn’t enough,” she said.
“Curiosity isn’t enough. Exactly. You’re starting to understand. When people
with money, people who matter, think of the Other, they think of aliens who
have been dead for 1,500 years. It’s a nightmare, in a way, a planet of corpses
who don’t know the oblivion they have momentarily escaped with us. Everybody
knows. If they were ever going to find their way to us, they probably already
would have. And if they’re looking at us, which they probably aren’t, what
would we have to say to them? So it makes everybody sad, that there’s
intelligent life out there and it doesn’t matter much. And sad is a hard sell.”
Ed was obviously wrapping up.
“You’re here to see, not to have insight. You will no doubt be struck by the
reality of a planet so similar to ours, so distant from ours, and you will
think deep thoughts about the loneliness of the cosmos. You may come to think
even about the fate of a universe that is probably one of many universes,
exemplified only by the fact that the universe that we happen to reside in
happens to have created observers. Don’t bother sharing these digressions. They
have already been written down by people who are 10,000 times more
perspicacious than you and I and still managed to die in comprehensive
obscurity.”
“Profitable and marketable,”6 Anne repeated.
“That’s correct. So tonight you have fewer than four hours to look at
Othertribespeople on a ring of the lesser Chekhovs. Nobody knows much about
them. They might have some new medicine. Anything that might have salable
value, report.”
“So I should call you if I see something new?”7
“Call me if you see an Other holding up a sign that says, ‘Hello, Earth. It’s
us up here.’ ”
_AT ITS PEAK, the Institution for the Study of Extraterrestrial Life had
employed 264 fully trained researchers at the banks of screens. The mania for
the Other had gripped the world, and every school devoted a class a week to its
study. Universities all over the world had Other departments. Biologists
handled the various pockets of life discovered in the rest of the universe,
slimes mutating fiercely but drably on dozens of freezing or burning hells. The
Other was its own field. The similarity had come as an existential shock to the
earth. A planet 1,564 light-years away had forests that were not dissimilar to
Earth’s forests. They had animals that were not that unlike the remaining
animals on Earth. And they had the Others, who lived in cities, with streets,
or in villages, or in tribes, just like us. The Others wore clothes. They fell
in love. They wrote books. They kept time. They had laws. The odds of two
worlds being conjured by chance at such similar points in their development—the
Other was roughly at Earth’s 1964—had to mean something. The anthropic
principle was considered proven. The universe could only exist under conditions
in which ourselves and the Others were there to witness it. Those were the days
when children, like Anne when she was a kid, wore pajamas with patterns of
glublefrings gamboling among the tzitziglug trees, and everybody called it The
Yonder. But all novelty eventually wears off. The natural market for the shock
of recognition is perishingly small.
Alone in the vast8 dark room, Anne wiped down the viewer again, just to be
sure. She understood why there had been so many conspiracies in the days after
discovery. It was like the machine fabricated the planet. Anne placed her face
inside. The sucking in of the face curtains sealed her. She was hovering over a
planet on the other side of the galaxy, 20 feet over a small group of
Othertribespeople at night, fishing.
The quality of the screen was so impeccable that the sense of her own body
dissolved, and she was a floating dot. There was no comparison to watching a
tape; this was live, or rather it was live 1,564 years ago. The tribe grouped
tightly around a mountain stream. The males held torches up to the water, where
a flurry of small fishes roiled on or under the surface, and a female Other
poised, a spear in her hand, waiting for a gallack. They were huge, the
gallacks, nearly the size of an Other. A single fish could feed a group of
tribespeople for a month of desert season.
Anne wanted to look a bit more closely. She reached down and her screen went
blank. She had zoomed too far. She pulled up with a clenched fist and an elbow
curl, and she was among the clouds above the mountains. The fire of the tribe’s
torches made a red9 and blue dot in the center. She pushed down slowly,
adjusting. She had asked one of her dissertation supervisors what it was like
working on the screens and he had told her it was like being an impotent god,
and the description was precise. Delicately, tentatively, Anne focused on the
face of the Other woman holding a spear. Sometimes a gallack might not come to
light for hours, and when it did, it offered maybe three seconds of its
purple-streaked skull bone for a strike. The Otherwoman’s eyes had narrowed
sharply in concentration, her eyes small, even for the eyes of the Others, who
had no nasal bridge, and whose button noses, like tiny dogs, were considerably
more powerful than a human nose. A horrific violence lurked in her gaze.
The Others stood so still, so intently and contentedly waiting for a slimy
mammoth fish to rise out of the waters. Why was she watching this? The hope was
that someone would hurt themselves in the hunt, and that the tribe would use an
herb that had found an analogue in the surviving jungles on Earth to repair the
damage. That’s how they had found that the bark of the Amazonian gluttaree had
curative properties for Bell’s palsy. That was profitable and marketable. Only
the leaves on the Other trees—she thought they were hualintratras, or maybe
grubgrubs—moved at all10. The shimmering and the stillness were so different
from the recordings, somehow. The recordings were always significant. That was
the difference. Something had always happened to make them worth watching,
worth preserving. The Othertribespeople were just waiting around for a gallack.
Maybe the gallack would come, or maybe it wouldn’t.
It wouldn’t really matter if she snuck off to the city for 20 minutes, would it?
She marked the place of the tribe, flicked up with a curled fist, saw the
planet whole for a second, found the biggest dot, centered herself visually,
and pushed down.
She landed accidentally in a funeral, right in the middle of the green twigs.
Curling up, she could see that a ritual was in its final stages, the morbid
consummation. The funeral must be in the Middle Space, off the straight avenue.
Soon they would have a horrible shattering, a grandiose howl, an unconditional
prostration. The crowd was small, six Others, so a prominent Other must have
died. The body was already under the branches though, so Anne couldn’t quite
tell.
She pulled up, too quickly, and she was once again too high. She hovered over
the whole of the OSC, the Other South City, momentarily dazzled11. There were
24 million Others in the city, more than any city on Earth had held for 50
years, and that was without counting however many were living in the
subterranean tunnels. Even at night, glowing with torches over the large
avenues, the circles within interlocked circles, orbs within orbs which were so
typically a figure of the Southern part of the main Continent, the City Center
sprawled haphazardly. So much life. So much life to see.
But all that life was none of her business. Her business was back on the lower
Chekhovs. Anne flipped back to the saved locale. The Othertribespeople were
still waiting patiently for a big fish to come to light.
Back in OSC, she floated over the Coil, the central avenue of the biggest Other
city. The flashes of the running Others, the tumult of their flat faces. Who to
follow? Who to forget?
She followed one Other licking his lips anxiously. He turned off the corner and
was gone. She followed another Other woman before she dipped into a store that
sold texts. The universe is crammed with fascinating irrelevance. Anne was just
watching now. All the work had already been done on the main streets, although
it grew out of date so rapidly. When she had been a xenosociologist, she had
studied some of the commercial patterns, the gift and theft matrices that
seemed to be their version of exchange. That was before her department, and all
the other departments except xenolinguistics, had been folded into general
xenology. They were all just xenologists now.
She widened her gaze and drifted into one of the neighborhoods halfway to the
Uppertown Stage, or more than halfway if the city was still spreading since she
had last read about it. The harsh tangerine dawn was rising on Other children
as they played the string game in its labyrinthine star patterns laid out in
the sand. She had written one of her first papers in grade school on
geometrical erudition in Other children games, an A+. Her teacher, Ms. Norwood,
had said, not quite believing it, that she might work at ISEL some day.
She remembered that Ms. Norwood had been a devotee of Wodeck’s theory of
distant proprioception, though it had been defunct as a theory even then. By
virtue of the Heisenberg principle, Wodeck argued, we must be altering the
Others in our observation of them. The idea was too Romantic for the academy or
the public, both of whom thought Heisenberg was fine for electrons but not for
aliens who had been dead for 1,500 years and whose remains had long since
rotted to ashes by the time their light had arrived. The idea was doubly
distasteful, because who knew who was watching us, and from where? Who wanted
to believe their lives were shaped by alien eyes?
Anne saw another Other girl, to a side of the players, reading pages, so she
pushed in, focused, and caught a corner of the text, cut and pasted it into the
archive comparer on the off chance it might be new and viable, a late entry
into the now mostly unread library of the Other.
Then the book, in the middle of being copied, fluttered from the Other girl’s
hands. The Other girl’s face was up, staring, in horrified confusion. Anne
flicked over to where the Other child was looking. A smoldering hole had formed
in the sand lot beside the children’s play space. A bizarre machine, unlike any
devices she had seen in any xenology class, careened12 at top pace down one of
the lesser coils. She looked down. An Other man and an Other woman were riding
in it, driving. The machine was large and silver. It would fit a bed. The thing
must have ripped through the surface. She had never heard of that. She looked
closer, and the Other man and the Other woman were carrying a baby, and they
had a look of terror and tenderness on their haggard faces, pale from the
cruelty of underground life. Anne pulled out with a curled fist, and they had
no chance to escape. The restraint work of the Other authorities was always
impressive in its brutality. The Others were monsters when it came to crime and
punishment and angrily excised any difference with savagery. A remorseless
circle of exalters, at least 30 of them, were coiling in on the fleeing Others.
How long did they have? She looked back, flipped up. The Other man smiled at
the Other woman for some obscure reason, cooed over the infant. She flipped
back and the round group of the sinister exalters crept in, and then they all
slowed, out of screen. She flipped back up and the strange machine had
vanished. She curled up more. The machine had crashed into a boulder, and the
Other woman with her baby were burning horribly inside the wreckage, and the
Other man, thrown clear, lay dying on the gray sand. The Other man was looking
straight up. He was looking straight up at Anne. He was staring at her across
the galaxy right into her eye.
ANNE’S FACE, as it sucked out of the viewer, pulled slightly on the flaps,
gently squeezing her eyeballs in their sockets13. Two hours and 17 minutes had
passed. Time was always distorted by drifting over the Other, what with a 36
hour, 17 minute, 54 second day. Culture shock is always worse coming home.
“Ed?” She called up the professor’s visuals from control. His face, on Skype,
was the haggard face of a begging administrator on one call after another.
“Hi Anne, did they hold up a sign saying ‘Hi, Earth’?”
“I saw something.”
“Is it profitable and marketable?”
Was there profit in that rickety old machine somewhere? Was there some kind of
profit in that? Or in the look of sadness on the Other’s face?
“There’s lots of wonderful things to see, Anne. Nobody needs us here to show
them a new wonderful thing. The moon shines wonderfully every evening. Nobody
needs 70,000-ton telescopes in the sky to show them a place they have never
seen before. If we want to keep an eye on, we have to find useful, profitable
Otherness. Not the new and wonderful. Got it? ”
“Got it.”
“Profitable and marketable.”
“Profitable and marketable.”
The wreckage was still smoldering gruesomely on the viewer. The corpse of the
Other man had already been cleared away. The machine, which must have been
cobbled together in the underground, chuffed and spluttered smokily. And there
was no way any of it could ever be profitable and marketable.
Anne called Lee, a colleague from graduate school who had worked on
subterranean history, and if she was recalling it right, even something with
machines. He was living in Cairo these days, she thought, some kind of
assistant professor at the uni there.
“Is that Anne?” he asked14. He was older, more slovenly than she remembered,
but it had been nearly 10 years. She reached him at a Shisha bar on Tahrir
Square. “Is that the Anne who is working, I heard, at ISEL and who is actually
looking into the sky?”
“That’s me.”
“And what can I do for Anne who has a good job at ISEL where she is looking
into the sky?”
“You once, long ago, studied the subterranea right?”
The hitch in his voice swelled awkwardly, stringently, into a silence. The envy
reached through the phone. Anne remembered. Lee had only managed a lousy
archival job15, rustling in 10-year-old tapes for culinary elements. All the
best dishes had been transferred years ago.
“Wow. You’re actually at ISEL asking me a question about the subterranean,
aren’t you?”
“That I am.”
His voice hitched again. “You didn’t see a real breakout, did you?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I just want to know if there’s any history on the machines
used in breakouts.”
Lee paused, recognizing that his scholarship might matter, realizing that the
Other existed, was existing, and he understood it, understood it usefully.
“Well, a big book on subterranea as a prison system is Nguyen’s Other
Underground, but that was 40 years ago or more even. The subterranea’s only had
maybe a thousand hours of inspection over the past 20 years.”
“Why is that?”
“I guess they figure if the Others don’t care about it, why would we? People
get bored with mysteries after awhile, for sure. And then there was an article
a couple of years ago, out of the unit at Oxford. ‘Otherness among the Other,’
but it was general xenosociology. Wasn’t that your field?”
“Before it all folded.”
“Right. We’re all xenologists now. Also, there’s a footnote in my last paper in
Otherism on the first escape, but you know all about that. So what can you tell
me about your breakout?”
She would be fired for a leak, even with Lee, even for a story no one cared to
hear. Systems grow stricter as institutions decline. If there is nothing
profitable or marketable in a thing, it must remain a secret or it has no value
at all.
HER PARENTS WERE still up when Anne, sick from the train and suffused with an
indefinable and all-suffusing disappointment, rolled through the portico of the
family farmstead. She found them in the viewing room, watching a new storm roll
ferociously over the cornfields and the apple orchard. Mom was lying down,
asleep, with her head on Dad’s lap. The lightning from the storm16 was
continuous enough that the room needed no other illumination, and Anne’s skin
tingled furtively17 with the electricity in the air. She sat beside her father
in the noise of the rain that filled her ears like a cloying syrup.
“How was the first day at ISEL?” he whispered.
“Everything I thought it would be.”
“And what did you think it would be then?”
It was the first time that day that anyone had cared what Anne thought. And at
that very moment she didn’t want to see or to record. At that very moment she
just wanted to listen to the rain.
“There’s just so much of it,” she said.
“It is another world.”
“And what are we doing looking at it?”
“Keeping an eye on, right?”
“Keeping an eye on what?”
Anne’s father ran a hand through her mother’s hair a few moments.
“This morning I was weighing in my mind that first book of the Other plants and
animals we bought you. Remember that?”
“Sure.”
“And those bedroom sheets you wanted so badly, the ones with a little
kangaroo-like Other thing on it. What are they called?”
“Calotricks.”
“And now you’re a grown-up woman, and they’re letting you look up in the sky
from the big machines at ISEL.”
The storm ripped the sky, harsh as a lash against her eyes. Her dad was proud
of her, but she could tell he cared less for the Other world—the distant
miracle, a sign however remote that we were not alone in the universe—than
whether she would be able to move out now that she had a job. She was about to
tell him about the nightmare chase of the burning woman and the dying man and
the baby they took with them when her mother roused, and Dad shushed and began
to sing:
Twinkle, twinkle18, little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle, twinkle little star19
How I wonder what you are.
He picked up his wife and carried her out of the viewing room to bed. Anne was
alone, more alone than before.
The exhaustion of the day accumulating inside her, she was glad of a half-dark
room and a storm. As a child, to be even a cog in the celestial machinery would
have been enough. She loved a whole other world, miraculously reflected in a
skypiercing eye. She was middle-aged now: There was only light, moving through
emptiness, trapped by machines20.
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