Under the Dome
Under the Dome is a 2009 science fiction novel by the American author, Stephen King. Under the Dome is the 58th book published by Stephen King, and it is his 48th novel. The novel focuses on a small Maine town, and tells an intricate, multi-character, alternating perspective story of how the town's inhabitants contend with the calamity of being suddenly cut off from the outside world by an impassable, invisible glass dome-like barrier that seemingly falls out of the sky, transforming the community into a domed city.
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- Maybe not as high brow as some of the other suggestions here but I really enjoyed Stephen King's Under The Dome. It's basically a story of small town political corruption and the human tendency to be easily exploited by dictatorial types in a crisis.
- Yeah, but it's non-fiction, which means that coherency does not need to be maintained during generation - it can always be recalled from a) the model's training (assuming this event was in the training data), and b) any context it was given in an initial prompt.
The test here was, specifically, coherency, which I feel is going to be difficult for even SOTA models to track over the standard novel length of 100k words (80k for YA novels).
Maybe if it's a novel about a single individual in a limited setting (so, pretty boring, but we are not measuring quality of plot), a SOTA model can keep it coherent?
I dunno how it would do with something like Stephen King's IT or Under the Dome (multiple parallel plots over 450k words, involving multiple main characters, with events on every single page needing to be coherent with the rest of the book), but before we even get there, standard novel lengths (around 100k words) would be the test for coherency.
- I thought you meant reading one thing while listing to a different audiobook. (I sometimes do this, and read your post while listening to Stephen King's Under the Dome, but I have to pause to respond. I can listen and read, but not listen and write.)
Anyway, I know a few people who often switch between reading the text and listening to the audio of a book. If your application seamless supports both reading and listening, whether it's simultaneously or switching from just one to just the other, it could be pretty useful for those who like to read sometimes and listen other times.
- > But it's a reminder of how fragile the social order is and how close we always are to its collapse.
It makes me wonder if "civilization" really exists, or if we really are just small groups of self-centered "tribes" with sets of overlapping goals...until they aren't.
Fiction writers have made extensive use of this tenuous balance as a plot point. "Under the Dome" by Stephen King comes immediately to mind as one recent example. Once the "boundary" goes up, the town's social order falls apart surprisingly fast (within days, even though power, water, food, and services are still there).
- I remember when "Under the Dome" was selling wholesale (Hardcover) for $13 and I ended up buying it from Walmart for $6.99 - because (A) it was $3.00 less than the eBook, and (B), well, I then could, in theory, resell the book.
It's odd watching two book sellers compete with each other to sell a book at loss.
But, your comment, "Amazon would let publishers rip them off in this way - paying more for something that costs less to produce." brings to mind Scalzi's comment,
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/07/30/amazons-latest-volley/
"(This is where many people decide to opine that the cost of eBooks should reflect the cost of production in some way that allows them to say that whatever price point they prefer is the naturally correct one. This is where I say: You know what, if you’ve ever paid more than twenty cents for a soda at a fast food restaurant, or have ever bought bottled water at a store, then I feel perfectly justified in considering your cost of production position vis a vis publishing as entirely hypocritical. Please stop making the cost of production argument for books and apparently nothing else in your daily consumer life. I think less of you when you do.)"
Think about the software that I purchase online that costs $0.001 to deliver and I pay $595 - it costs 1/10,000th what the old version with paper books, and CDs, and nice glossy boxes.
I agree with Scalzi - the argument about "it costs less to produce" is bogus. Something should be worth whatever value it has to the person buying it intersecting with whatever price the person willing to sell it wants, plain and simple. The cost of creation is not particularly interesting.
- I'm reading Under the Dome right now. After this I'm thinking of starting The Gunslinger.
