That's a book? - Harvard Gazette

"A half-century before the advent of LLMs, Italo Calvino was experimenting with the use of combinatory and computational systems for crafting new literary works. The automation of writing, he speculated, could open up powerful new horizons of literary expression as machines became increasingly capable of bringing to the page "all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination.""

"Frustrated by the limitations of period computer technology, he found his ideal "machine" in the tarot card decks used by card players and cartomancers. Such is the storytelling engine deployed in "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" (1973), a novel built out of images instead of words, in which the narrator "plays" two separate decks and each run of cards generates a sequence of intertwined tales."

Italo Calvino experimented with combinatory and computational systems for literary creation half a century before large language models emerged. Frustrated by period computer technology limitations, he discovered an ideal "machine" in tarot card decks. "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" (1973) uses tarot images as a storytelling engine rather than traditional words. The narrator plays two separate decks, with each card sequence generating intertwined tales incorporating stories from classical works like "Orlando Furioso," "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "King Lear." The novel divides into two sections set in different locations, each built around distinct tarot decks from the 15th century.

Read at Harvard Gazette