The Annals of the Parrigues

As I’ve noted, travel narratives and guidebooks were a common framing device in 2015′s NaNoGenMo. Emily Short, dame of interactive fiction, contributed her own post-NaNoGenMo generated travel guide to imaginary lands. She approached the project as a collaboration between her and her machine co-writer, playing to the strengths of each.

The text is unusually readable. While you’ll certainly notice repetition, there are enough different patterns at work that you can still find something unexpected in another page or two. The Annals demonstrates multiple layers of organization in both its formal patterns and on an aesthetic, literary level. This is one procedurally generated novel that is interesting to the end.

That’s not the only reason that you should read it. The second half of the work is a discussion of the procedural generation and the principles that went into co-writing with the machine. The organizing elements of Salt, Mushroom, Beeswax, Venom, and Egg are worth studying as both an aesthetic tarot and as common principles for generative works. 

If you want to write for procedural generation–which is not quite the same as writing procedural generation, though they overlap–Emily Short’s remarks are particularly valuable. The discussion of Venomous writing, for example, or the Mushroomy nature of Markov chains, or the proper use of Beeswax: all things I found illuminating and inspirational.

The book seems to have inspired a little bit of fanfiction; there’s a subreddit dedicated to the Parrigues and a wikia, though they’re both a bit sparse.