World Clock

by Nick Montfort

World Clock tells of 1440 incidents that take place around the world at each minute of a day. The novel was inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s “One Human Minute” and Harry Mathews’s “The Chronogram for 1998.” It celebrates the industrial concept of time and certain types of vigorous banality which are shared by all people throughout the world.

This novel was generated with 165 lines of Python code, all of which were written by the author in about four hours on November 27, 2013. The only external data source that is used in the generation process is the computer’s time zone database. The source code is available under a free software license at http://nickm.com/code; anyone is welcome to use that code to generate their own novel or for any other purpose. World Clock was generated as part of the first "NaNoGenMo" or National Novel Generation Month, which was declared on Twitter this year as a response to, and alternative to, the better-known NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at MIT. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities; the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10; and the coeditor of The New Media Reader (all published by the MIT Press).

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is now precisely 14:14 in Canberra. In some dim yet adequate dwelling, a person named Lisa, who is of completely average stature, reads the last word of a pristine manuscript. She smiles a tiny smile.