Talk to Transformer

Hi, all!

I’ve been catching up on my friends’ blogs after my adventures in Israel and found a really fun post over on Dreams and Dragons, the blog of one of my fellow fairy-tale retellers, Sarah Pennington.  She used the Talk to Transformer interface to see how her stories would begin if she fed the first few lines to the Transformer, then let the AI generate the next few sentences.  I tried this with some of my own stories, and the AI gave me such wacky results that I just had to share!

“Guardian of our Beauty” (published in Rooglewood’s Five Magic Spindles anthology) is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty set in ancient Syria.  Below, the sentences in bold are mine and the rest comes from the Transformer.

1. And it happened in the days of the great heroes, in the years of the warrior-shepherds, that the king of Gubla had no son. (He even begged a wife from the King of the Four Quarters, the master of the Black-Headed People; but the Great King did not send him a wife. The Great King did not even receive the king of Gubla’s messenger.) The Great King gave a woman, named Nya, three children, and each one bore the name B'nefer. (Troll and goblin, too.)  It was a wise idea from the Great King: he would not send Nya back to her parents. There were no mother-born children and no unbroken lineage among the Four Quarters. A king who could not raise a son was not very wise. A king who could raise a son was indeed very wise.
But there was a problem, and a great problem. Nya had no male heirs. She was the only daughter of the Great King of Gubla. So what if there were sons? Was this good or terrible?

The interface was a bit confused about who the characters were… but I’m intrigued by this version that focuses on the King of the Four Quarters instead of the king of Gubla.  What was his deal anyway?  Did he have any interesting adventures?  And then there’s that line: There were no mother-born children and no unbroken lineage among the Four Quarters.  I’m not totally sure what this means but it sounds like a very interesting premise.

2. And it happened in the days of the great heroes, in the years of the warrior-shepherds, that the king of Gubla had no son. (He even begged a wife from the King of the Four Quarters, the master of the Black-Headed People; but the Great King did not send him a wife. The Great King did not even receive the king of Gubla’s messenger.) Then the old man of Gudna, on his deathbed, began to weep for the fate of his country. The king of Gubla said, "Why should I weep for my children? Why make a weeping king? Why not give me my children by the hand? What can I give them by the hand?"

            "Thou art not a King of Gubla that I would want to see," said the old man of Gudna.

            "Thou hast brought up thy children, the son born of Gudna, and thou hast brought up his wife from the Black-Headed People."

            "But I wish to see them alive and well," said the old man of Gudna.

            "That is the right thing to do," said the king of Gubla to him. Then he gave permission to the son of Gudna to come into his house.

Wow.  Okay.  There’s some sort of family drama going on here, clearly.  And it looks like the king of Gubla is going to adopt the son of the old man of Gudna as his heir?  I love the thou arts and thou hasts—apparently my first few lines are recognizably Bible-ese.

“Overpowered” is a Snow White retelling set in ancient Israel that was part of the Magic Mirrors co-release.  Let’s see what the Transformer does with a bit of the first chapter…

3. Taliyah fled through the dark, stumbling over the rocks at the bottom of the wadi. As she went she wiped her hands on her skirt, but she did not look down to see if they were clean. She was sure that they were not.  The water was still dripping from the broken rock pillars as she climbed into her vehicle. She did not hesitate to open the door when someone stopped her. A man wearing traditional Afghan clothing spoke in a calm, caring tone. He carried a bag made of woven white fabric and pointed toward the path in the direction of the wadi.

Taliyah saw the man. She recognized the man but could not see his face. He had a small boy in his arms. The boy was wrapped in a blanket, his face hidden by thick leaves. He stared at the ground with a small frown.

Taliyah started to panic as she realized that she and the boy were trapped and could not get back to the family she and the man were supposed to return to. She did not know what awaited her, but she knew no other way. The man walked toward her. He spoke to her, trying to reason with her. "It's your duty. I am sorry.”

Hmm… I want to read this story now!  What is the man trying to get Taliyah to do?  Is she trying to escape in this vehicle?  And why is the boy’s face hidden by thick leaves?  Such a strange little detail.  And once again the AI figured stuff out about my story that I wouldn’t have expected—the reference to a wadi shows that it knows roughly the story is set.  Just from Taliyah’s name?

Let me share one more.  This time I gave the Transformer a bit of an urban fantasy story I’m working on… well, I guess it’s technically a contemporary semi-rural fantasy.  I tried this bit of story in the Transformer a number of times and got a lot of very strange results.  I guess snakes = weirdness on the internet?  But here’s a fun one.

4. There was a snake in the window well. Aso glared at it. It didn’t glare back, not being interested in the person living in the basement apartment. It looked mighty comfy, half covered in dried leaves with the sun sparkling on its black scales. It looked alive. I could feel it getting warmer.   I let the feeling out and let my back towards the window rise up as it grew. When I was younger I'd heard there was some sort of trap outside, but it didn't seem to bother me one way or another. I wasn't sure what to make of this thing, but you couldn't argue how it looked interesting.

            What it did was it slowly descended the window frame, looking like a snake, and then it started to crawl. Aso was not going to let this go unchallenged.  This was going to take years. But if he was going to face it and take it on, he was going to be a man.
            I was already halfway to the apartment when I heard a loud snap and a bang as the ceiling fell in.

So the snake is a trap, or a challenge… I like that.  The snake is an important catalyst in my story, and it seems to be in the AI’s version too.  Though I’m a little worried about poor Aso, who apparently was prepared to spend years fighting the snake and then had the ceiling fall on him!

Have you all tried talking to the Transformer?  What did it know about your story that surprised you?  Its pronouns are all over the place and it doesn’t do a good job of keeping track of characters, but it comes up with a lot of things that almost make sense.

Coming up soon, look for book reviews of the new Rapunzel retellings from the Golden Braids co-release!

Adventures in Israel!

Camel rides at the Dead Sea

 

I spent the month of June digging at an archaeological site in Israel, which was great fun.   I was digging in the Judean desert in sight of Jericho, so we were in the West Bank.  The West Bank is pretty economically depressed... the modern town of Jericho is full of half-built businesses, including a theme park that never seems to have opened.  The area where we were digging is inhabited only by Bedouin, who herd goats all over those mountains.  (We had to chase goats out of the road every day!)  It is definitely not an agricultural area.  Even the weeds on the mountain we climbed every morning hug the ground and look dry and unhappy by this time of year.  The little boys who herd goats around our site thought we were very interesting.  They would come and share our food and grin at us.  The littlest boy had a donkey that he would ride around as he followed the goats.

 

Up the long long hill to our site!

Our dig site was a fortress town from the middle of the monarchic period (after Israel and Judah parted ways).  Being on a mountain top near the Auja spring, it has both a strategic location (watching for trouble coming across the Jordan from Moab) and access to enough water to sustain a group, although the spring is not terribly close to the fort.  And the mountain is very steep on that side; I climbed down it one day looking for caves.  (I found lots of caves, but no burials.) 

Most of the time on the dig I was working in an ancient cooking area.  We found a tabun (a mud-brick cooking pot) as well as several hearths and mysterious installations that probably had to do with cooking.  I also worked in an area just outside the corner of the monumental building we found--a building with very thick walls that may have originally stood 2-3 stories high.  Clearly an administrative building of some kind.  Unfortunately, the Ottomans had built a stone structure right on top of it that we didn't have time to disassemble.

 

Tabun.

 

People always ask, "What did you find?" Personally... I found lots of dirt.  Also the bedrock in several places (limestone with outcroppings of flint).  Some broken pottery.  Which is very interesting from an archaeological perspective but not so much from a telling-people-about-it perspective.  "So where's the golden treasure?" one person asked me.  Alas, not all sites have golden treasure. 

Herod's palace at Masada, from before the rebels lived there.

Our group did a good bit of touring on the weekends.  The first week we made it down to the Dead Sea, the fortress of Masada, the "commune" and caves at Qumran, and (according to a 2nd century AD tradition) Jesus' baptism site on the Jordan.  The second week we went to Lachish, a massive fortress city with a monumental gate and palace, and to Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Elah Valley (ancient Shaaraim).  The third week we stopped briefly at Tel Ashkelon to see the Canaanite gate and then went to the beach, where I proceeded to get horribly sunburned.  (I thought I was in the shade...  This will teach me to sit and read books instead of swimming in the ocean.)

 

At Khirbet Qeiyafa, looking toward the Elah Valley.

 

We were staying in Jerusalem near Herod's Gate, so we had a lot of time to wander around the Old City and the museums.  I made it to the Rockefeller Museum and the Israel Museum, as well as the Biblical Zoo, the City of David, the Dome of the Rock, the Archaeological Park, the Lithostratos, the Mount of Olives (nothing to see there except views of the rest of the city), and so on.  Having been in Jerusalem, I can no longer say that traffic in New York is the worst I've ever seen.  Although the fact that they use roundabouts instead of stop lights may be a large part of that.

 

View from the Mt of Olives toward the Dome of the Rock.  Note Old City wall.

 

The most beautiful place I went: Shiloh.  Lots of vineyards and olive trees around there.

 

 

 

The most interesting place: Khirbet Qeiyafa.  I may write a whole blog post about this in future.

My favorite museum: actually the Rockefeller, not the Israel Museum.  The Rockefeller has a lot of the smaller, less glamorous finds all in a very compact area so that you can easily compare pottery across the centuries.

 

 

My favorite place in Jerusalem: the Archaeological Park.  The stuff at the front which they list in the brochure is all pretty modern (... early Islamic period ...) but if you go back to Hulda's Gate there are a TON of poorly labeled buildings from the Second Temple and even First Temple periods.  Really amazing stuff.

Looking across archaeological park toward Mt of Olives.

The place I most want to set a story: our own archaeological site in the Judean desert.  Those barren hills are stuck in my brain now!

View from our site toward Jericho, the Jordan, and Moab!