And Scotty said, "Computer, tell us a story"

And so the computer did. Sorta.

November is NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month), started last year by Darius Kazemi, says The Verge.

Nick Montfort’s World Clock was the breakout hit of last year. A poet and professor of digital media at MIT, Montfort used 165 lines of Python code to arrange a new sequence of characters, locations, and actions for each minute in a day. He gave readings, and the book was later printed by the Harvard Book Store’s press. Still, Kazemi says reading an entire generated novel is more a feat of endurance than a testament to the quality of the story, which tends to be choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing.

"Even Nick expects you to maybe read a chapter of it or flip to a random page," Kazemi says.

Narrative is one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. Companies and researchers are working to create programs that can generate intelligible narratives, but most of them are restricted to short snippets of text.

And a good thing, too.