"Our Arrival"

[aparrish]

I intend to participate.

[aparrish]

Some progress. I used spacy and wordnet to extract sentences from selected Project Gutenberg texts that make no reference to people (i.e., only descriptions of natural objects). Below is prototype output; it's just selecting random sentences from the corpus and putting them together into paragraphs. I'm planning to create some additional procedures to glue these sentences together in more interesting ways, but I wanted to show what I had working so far!

Was the line clear of people? But this northwest wind was 
not a simple breeze. Towards the north-east, the country 
appeared to be very level, with only one low ridge, 
apparently at a great distance. Its sides rose and fell 
with its laboured breathing. The populated city was a 
delusion.

In the evening the wind changed to south. The water left in 
the buckets was solid ice. This whole space was as bright 
as day with the reflection of the fire.

The soil, when newly turned up, appeared of a dull red 
colour. The river was here a rapid stream, four hundred 
yards in width, with high sandy banks, and here and there a 
scanty growth of willow. The water was cold, of course, The 
country was very fine. Waterfalls of many forms poured over 
the rims. A fine snow began to sift downward.

The great trunks were soft serrated brown, and the gnarled 
branches stood out in perfect proportions. Then another 
storm threatened. At five miles made the range.

The gale continued for three days, the wind attaining a 
velocity of seventy miles an hour. Then its movement ceased 
suddenly. The rain continued as yesterday during the whole 
of the day, accompanied with cold winds.

Seen close this mechanism was no longer small. Large 
lagoons and reaches of water appeared in the scattered 
channels. The sea undulated peaceably under the stern of 
the vessel. The whole country was alight, and down there 
the world seemed on fire.

The wind became piercing cold, and all comfort was gone.

A hole in the roof permitted the smoke from burning oil 
egress; yet the atmosphere was far from lucid. Far ahead a 
chain of soft gray round hills led up to the dark heaved 
mass of mountains. The rain poured down in roaring 
cataracts. A hard wind, eager and nipping, blew up the 
canyon. These openings seemed like the beds of dried-up 
torrents.

For some days the heat was overpowering, and the 
atmosphere, saturated with electricity, was only cleared by 
violent storms. The city turned out to be a village of 
fifty houses with twenty people in each house. Waterfalls 
of many forms poured over the rims. The next day the 
country got wilder and more dilly. Its banks were sloping 
and grassy, and were overhung by trees of magnificent size. 
The rain poured down in roaring cataracts.

[ikarth]

I've been trying to find new ways to grab standalone bits from the Project Gutenberg texts, for repurposing elsewhere. I hadn't thought of this one. Clever.

[aparrish]

My novel: Our Arrival (PDF). The source code is here.

[kevandotorg]

This is magnificent, haunting stuff. Even with the preamble about "no references to people", the fact that an obliquely-described person still might slip through into the text at some point (or might never) makes it quite a genuinely gripping read.

[aparrish]

@kevandotorg thank you!