All possible plots by major authors (2020)

#All possible codebases by major programmers<p>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.<p>Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial matters of syntax END.<p>John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.<p>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.

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 &quot;Trial and Error&quot; 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:<p>&gt; Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl

Every New Yorker short fiction: our protagonist, a slightly dislikable person, suffers from a medium-high amount of ennui.

To summarize Dan Brown books by describing the characters fundamentally misunderstands them. The characters are about as important as the characters in a porno.<p>The point of a Dan Brown book is to chart the stupidest possible path through history and pop science, and he&#x27;s uniquely capable of this.

Terry Pratchett: A visionary on the Discworld invents something vaguely like a modern object or industry. That invention enslaves the visionary and must be stopped by a crotchety old person who hates change.

Wodehouse: Titanic forces beyond your control such as scheming aunts, accidental engagements, and inability to express your feelings threaten to irrevocably ruin your life forever. It’ll take a Machiavellian mastermind and a series of unlikely coincidences to extricate you from this predicament but you’ll have to pay a price.<p>They really didn’t do Wodehouse justice in the OP

A link to &quot;All Possible Plots II&quot; [0] would have been better, because it includes everything in &quot;All Possible Plots I&quot;<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-fence.com&#x2F;all-possible-plots-ii&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-fence.com&#x2F;all-possible-plots-ii&#x2F;</a>

Michael Crichton: Humanity employs raw hubris and technological advancement for a close-encounter with non-humanity. Chaos ensues.

Albert Camus: Alone and isolated you grapple with the absurdities of existence. And who the f*k are you?

Andy Weir: Your indomitable human spirit has gotten you far. Now in the face of overwhelming odds, you will need to show resilience and science the shit out of your situation.

Reminds me of &quot;Book-A-Minute&quot; (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rinkworks.com&#x2F;bookaminute&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rinkworks.com&#x2F;bookaminute&#x2F;</a>) from yesteryear.<p>Most of the entries are for specific books, but there are also some authors mentioned, e.g. &quot;The Collected Works of Dean Koontz&quot;: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rinkworks.com&#x2F;bookaminute&#x2F;b&#x2F;koontz.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rinkworks.com&#x2F;bookaminute&#x2F;b&#x2F;koontz.shtml</a>

Stephen King: A character wonders if, given all the suffering recently endured over the last few hundred pages, life is nonetheless still worth living. This character is killed by an entity which, despite all appearance and reputation, is permanently and inexplicably murderous.

I need an &quot;Every possible comment by Hacker News users&quot;

All possible trees by major forests

Stephen King: you&#x27;ll know better than to FAFO after I tell you what happened in Maine a few decades ago.

What does it say about me that I&#x27;ve only actually read 14 of the 56 authors in the second list [1] <i>as an adult</i> (i.e. by choice)? I know <i>of</i> quite a few, but haven&#x27;t read most of them.<p>Here&#x27;s my list (++ indicates more than 1):<p><pre><code> Fitzgerald Hemingway ++ Shakespeare ++ Christie ++ Brown ++ Dickens McCarthy ++ Wodehouse ++ Steinbeck ++ Stoppard Kafka Conan Doyle ++ Seuss (of course) ++ Lee </code></pre> A missing classic author is Robert Louis Stevenson - all his books are amazing, even 150 year later.<p>If you&#x27;ve read more than one Dickens novel, you have my deepest respect.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-fence.com&#x2F;all-possible-plots-ii&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-fence.com&#x2F;all-possible-plots-ii&#x2F;</a>

Funny, thanks. This is another very fun one in the same spirit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mcsweeneys.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;what-your-favorite-sad-dad-band-says-about-you" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mcsweeneys.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;what-your-favorite-sad-d...</a>

Or mix together your own plot, by combining any of the tropes in the &quot;Periodic Table of Storytelling&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesharris.design&#x2F;periodic&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesharris.design&#x2F;periodic&#x2F;</a>

I sent them all to ChatGPT 4o one by one and had it guess the books, this is how it did:<p>1. Anthony Trollope – I didn’t get this one. 2. Evelyn Waugh – Correct! 3. Henry James – Correct! 4. Graham Greene – I missed this, was thinking of the wrong tone. 5. W. Shakespeare (i) – Correct! 6. Samuel Richardson – Correct! 7. David Foster Wallace – I guessed Gaddis, but this makes perfect sense. Partial credit. 8. Marcel Proust – Correct! 9. Mrs. Gaskell – Correct! 10. Ian McEwan – Partial credit; I guessed Atonement after Henry James. 11. E. M. Forster – Correct! 12. Cormac McCarthy – Correct! 13. P. G. Wodehouse – Correct! 14. Alan Bennett – I guessed Chekhov&#x2F;Osborne, so I missed this. 15. Jane Austen – Correct! 16. Dan Brown – Correct! 17. Agatha Christie – Correct! 18. Zadie Smith – Missed this one. 19. W. Shakespeare (ii) – Correct! 20. Iris Murdoch – Correct! 21. Ernest Hemingway – Correct! 22. John Banville – Correct! 23. Harold Pinter – Correct! 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Correct! 25. Tennessee Williams – Correct! 26. Oscar Wilde – Correct! 27. D. H. Lawrence – Correct! 28. Thomas Hardy – Correct! 29. Virginia Woolf – Missed this one, was thinking of Galsworthy. 30. Tom Stoppard – Correct!<p>Final score: 25&#x2F;30 with a couple of partial credits. Not bad!

Because I hope that more people listen to the audiobook series <i>Strange Company</i>:<p>Nick Cole:<p>Log Keeper&#x27;s Note: Aftermath. In those dark years of the long crossing between the world we&#x27;d cut loose of the bad contract on, and the repair facility on Hardrock, the Strange Company slept and the galaxy caught fire as we dreamed for twenty-five years of sublight. The old order of the Monarchs, mighty yet petty gods determined to burn worlds and take humanity with them down into the deep dark graves of empire, began its final collapse. Worlds fell into shadowy chaos, overrun by the cackle of automatic weapons carried by the Simia Legions, while ring stations at Oberon and Circe burned like fiery jewels. Into this madness and maelstrom rode the Strange Company.<p>(That’s a slightly abridged excerpt from the second audiobook of the duology, <i>Voodoo Warfare</i>. I call them audiobooks rather than novels because in print form they are merely quite good but very derivative examples of their genre, but as narrated by Christopher Ryan Grant, they are among the most epic and inspiring stories I have ever heard come alive.)

Every social network: you make something for your friends and end up with viral growth immediately or after years of nothing. You spend the rest of your days policing trolls, spammers, and scammers trying to abuse or hijack the network. You or someone in marketing send out too many spammy notifications abusing user trust and users block your notifications. Nobody shows up anymore and network dies.<p>Every rom-com: Boy meets girl and they have good times. Somebody messes up. They have a fight. The get back together again.<p>Every Hallmark movie: Big city girl ends up in small town by coincidence. While decorating for Christmas she falls for the small town guy and decides to stay. (The productions get cheaper by the year, so where they had scenery you now see people talking in front of a blurry background for 90% of the plot. )

I want an author who&#x27;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...

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

Cervantes: hipster idealistic old fart with vintage books tries to roam around the world with a pragmatic and grounded singleton as if they lived in &#x27;the good old times from the books&#x27; kicking the asses of bad guys. Instead of a militia, they look like funny hobos disguised as comedy soldiers in a TV sketch. &#x27;Modern&#x27;, real life events hit the hipster back. Literally, up to the point seeing the singleton lecturing him over and over after several clashes with the world. Everyone laughs.

&gt;&gt; <i>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.</i><p>Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute:<p>You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are instead employed at the postal service, where you spend the rest of your days watching your first manuscript submission mistakenly misrouted back across your desk.

&quot;thomas hardy<p>Lies, lies, misery, lies, suicide, rape, and corn prices.&quot;<p>So true

Brandon Sanderson: scrappy protagonist discovers that they have magical powers, despite struggling from crushing depression and&#x2F;or trauma. This annoying guy named Hoid smirks at everyone. The next weekend they accidentally trigger the end of the world, which they prevent in the nick of time by becoming a god.

They could have had an entry for McSweeney&#x27;s that just said &quot;the text of this article&quot;.

Iain M Banks: (spoilers) the narrator is secretly an AI

Stephan Wolfram: here is a fascinating and subtle mathematical curiosity and also my Incredible Equivalent Formulation As Cellular Automata.

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.<p>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.

Both articles (there&#x27;s a sequel) read like not bad flash fiction.

See also, PLOTTO, all possible plots by ALL authors:<p>1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;garykac.github.io&#x2F;plotto&#x2F;plotto-mf.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;garykac.github.io&#x2F;plotto&#x2F;plotto-mf.html</a><p>2) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;146941343&#x2F;plotto-an-algebra-book-for-fiction-writing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;146941343&#x2F;plotto-an-algebra-b...</a>

OK but where&#x27;s James Joyce?

Someone do Michael Moorcock.

The only one of these parodies that makes me want to read the author being parodied is Hemingway.<p>Apparently, dude could write.

LOL!

I miss literary fiction but with age my weakness for a point has become an all consuming vice.