My review of Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's 2020 novel The Salvage Crew is up at Strange Horizons. This book was in part a survival story about a group of characters stranded on an alien planet, but also a work exploring questions related to the validity of computer generated art. In the forward to the novel, Wijeratne discussed how he wrote this story with the help of computer algorithms that created random events in the plot and then worked to incorporate these events into a narrative that felt both natural and meaningful.
On the whole, while I had some issues with the book's ending (I go into this in the review), I thought it was fascinating to follow how Wijeratne developed this story, building on the computer-generated plot twists, while also giving the struggles of his characters an added emotional weight due to how he fully explored the consequences of each turn in the story.
The first paragraph of the review is below:
Among the most intriguing aspects of Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's 2020 novel The Salvage Crew is the context in which the book was written. In the book's foreword, Wijeratne discusses how he developed The Salvage Crew’s narrative with the help of various automated computer programs. In particular, he describes how he used a modified version of an online “planet generator” to create the alien world which forms the setting of his story; a machine learning algorithm trained on the works of the Tang Dynasty poets Du Fu and Li Bai to compose a set of poems produced by the book’s narrator; and (perhaps most importantly) a collection of Python scripts he'd written to generate a string of random events in his plot—everything from sudden changes in the weather to disagreements that might arise between the book’s characters.
The full review can be read at Strange Horizons here.
