Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

SPOILERS WARNING! In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped. From the writer’s point of view, all activities in the physical world had been frozen - the bullet remained stationary in the air, his body unmovable.

I want to see writers use GitHub for literary experimentation. It can be a new form of ergodic literature. Imagine a novel released as a GitHub repo. Readers can read it. They can check out all the branches to explore parallel universes of alternative plots. They can read the revision history as a meta-novel, to learn about the writing process. And of course, they can make new versions of the novel by merging branches. It’s like Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths taken to the next level.

Idea for a short story: linguists have been puzzled by a mysterious ancient manuscript written in a unknown language. It was deciphered after a computer scientist realized that the manuscript is a definition of the language that it’s written in.