Edited by John Compton Sundman, Rosalita Associates (August 26, 2002)

Computers can play chess as well as any grandmaster. They can diagnose cancer as well as any oncologist, find oil as well as any seismologist. But can they do that most human of all activities: can they tell a story? Read Cheap Complex Devices and find out.

Winners of the inaugural Hofstadter Prize for machine-written narrative, these artificially constructed stories represent the future of post-human fiction.

Hugh Betcham, of Betcham Review Services
The future is here, we cannot outrun it. Confront it, love it in the sublime prose of this book.

Rusty Foster, of Kuro5hin.org
Cheap Complex Devices is astonishing on every level a book can be astonishing. . . a pure breathtaking feat of narrative.

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John Sundman Official Website

Download the Book (Pdf format, 1.4MB)

From the Inside Flap:

If Charles Dickens had been a parallel processor, if Leo Tolstoy had been made of silicon, if Vladimir Nabokov had written in hexadecimal, if John Updike had a universal power supply and a cooling fan, they might have written Cheap Complex Devices, winners of the inaugual Hofstadter Prize for computer-written novel awarded by the prestigious Society for Analytical Engines. Cheap Complex Devices represents the state of the art in mechanically-constructed narrative, and the future of fiction.

About the Author:

John Compton Sundman, the editor of this volume, had a long career as a technical writer at Digital MicroSystems, Inc. Now retired, he lives alone on remote Stanhope Island, Maine, where his chief recreation is correspondence chess.

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