someone like you (13. 515)

Published posthumously as a collection of YA short fiction from the author’s adult corpus among The Umbrella Man and Other Stories, problematic fav Roald Dahl in The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1954) deals with a mechanically-minded engineer (named Adolphe Knipe, almost certainly a lightly-veiled reference to Dahl’s own US publisher, Alfred A Knopf, who reasons that the rules of language are fixed by certain mathematical principles, like the advances in calculators he has recently delivered on commission for his employer, and applies this exploit by creating a mammoth machine able to create a best-seller (see also) in fifteen minutes. Ending on a cautionary note, writers from around the world are left with no choice but to license their authorship, and by extension, human creativity, to the machine, spurned by the industry that rejected his moonlighting endeavours and taking his revenge by making all writing mediocre and formulaic at best, acknowledging that quantity bested quality in the final reckoning.