Short stories and a study on computer science in fiction
Creative writing, 2022
Short stories with absurd premises, and a study of how Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics uses fiction to show computer science’s effect on our inner lives.
- Purpose
- Explore how fiction can make an abstract computer science idea felt, not just understood.
- Audience
- Readers of literary fiction, with or without a background in computer science.
- Format
- Short stories and a research study
What I delivered
Short stories
Stories with absurd premises, including one that dramatizes abstraction.
Study of Cosmicomics
How Calvino turns scientific ideas into stories about how it feels to live with them.
A video summary of the research, from Carnegie Mellon’s Meeting of the Minds.
Outcomes
- Won a SURF Creative Writing Fellowship from Carnegie Mellon to write it.
- Presented the research at Carnegie Mellon’s Meeting of the Minds.
- A story that makes abstraction, a core idea in computer science, something a reader feels.
Challenges
There’s very little fiction about computer science to learn from.
Studied how Calvino’s Cosmicomics turns physics and cosmology into stories, and applied it to computing.
Explaining an idea like abstraction kills a story.
Built each premise around the idea, so readers live through it instead of being told about it.
The stories had to work for readers who don’t know computer science.
Kept the technical idea under the surface: the story has to stand on its own.