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All possible plots by major authors (2020)

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Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#61

Post by riwsky »

mp05 wrote: post #46
riwsky wrote: post #40

#All possible codebases by major programmers Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now. Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has se…

> Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on. Pretty brilliant, right? Right?

Please forgive my JavaScript joke: it’s really just a poorly-written series of callbacks.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#62

Post by farmeroy »

w-m wrote: post #27
ethbr1 wrote: post #16

>> Dan Brown -- Award-winning author Dan Brown has written a complicated role for you with his expensive pen. You are a humanities professor at an Ivy League university, but also, somehow, in mortal peril. Your love interest is picturesque but ill-mannered and French. This is somehow worth several million dollars. Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute: You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are…

Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown! > Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy…

I clicked on this link with one of my two index fingers and felt the joy of a person feeling enjoyment

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#63

Post by netcoyote »

William Gibson: You are an adequate but drug-addled hacker, navigating dangerous, high-tech worlds where blurred realities, conspiracies, and corporate power struggles force you to uncover hidden truths, survive against powerful forces, and ultimately question the nature of identity, technology, and control.

Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch cereal.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#64

Post by tzs »

Jack Woodford, a decent pulp writer in the first half of the 20th century who also wrote several books on writing and on how the publishing industry works, including "Trial and Error" in 1933 which Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury both cited as a major influence in getting their writing careers started, had a nice description of how to plot:

> Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#65

Post by tptacek »

wwilim wrote: post #7

Stephen King: you'll know better than to FAFO after I tell you what happened in Maine a few decades ago.

To do King justice you have to capture some kind of on-the-nose allegory (alcoholism, childhood trauma, the existential dread of one's musical tastes being classifiable as dad-rock, the Cold War), and it can't be about the corruption and decline of small-town New England, which is everpresent. Yog-Sothoth should make an appearance.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#66

Post by dsr_ »

farmeroy wrote: post #57

I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts. Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would find one of those two things...

Not exactly, but Walter Jon Williams keeps switching genres successfully:

- Napoleonic sea fighting

- early cyberpunk (Hardwired)

- middle cyberpunk around the Solar System (Voice of the Whirlwind)

- late cyberpunk post-scarcity space opera(Aristoi)

- transhuman space opera (Implied Spaces)

- New Mexican police procedural / thriller (Days of Atonement)

- near future thrillers (This Is Not A Game and sequelae)

- fantasy of city infrastructure (Metropolitan and City on Fire)

- comedy of manners (the Drake Maijstral trilogy)

- Fall of the Space Roman Empire (Dread Empire's Fall series)

- Medieval fantasy (Quillifer and sequelae)

and a Giant Disaster novel, a Zelaznyesque SF mystery, and a Star Wars work-for-hire.

There's enough there for five separate authors to make marks on the field.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#67

Post by grotorea »

mp05 wrote: post #46
riwsky wrote: post #40

#All possible codebases by major programmers Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now. Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has se…

> Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on. Pretty brilliant, right? Right?

I would like to quote the creator of Dogecoin:

> In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency.

> “i made doge in like 2 hours i didn’t consider anything,” he wrote.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#68

Post by npilk »

farmeroy wrote: post #57

I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts. Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would find one of those two things...

Sounds like you'd be interested in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges - your comment brings Pierre Menard to mind.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#69

Post by schlauerfox »

netcoyote wrote: post #63

William Gibson: You are an adequate but drug-addled hacker, navigating dangerous, high-tech worlds where blurred realities, conspiracies, and corporate power struggles force you to uncover hidden truths, survive against powerful forces, and ultimately question the nature of identity, technology, and control. Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you…

New Neal Stephenson out today, looking forward to more of that formula, we'll see.

Re: All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#70

Post by NBJack »

jl6 wrote: post #8

Hacker News: Apple launches data center on a stick, and boy does Elon Musk have an opinion about that (14879 comments)

HN comments, N levels deep: The subtle mention of a largely tangential but controversial topic is important to me. Here is an eight-paragraph thinly-veiled diatribe on why you are wrong.
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