Troped!

The Lyttle Lytton Contest is an annual challenge to write the worst (but somewhat brief) opening line of a novel.

Back in 2011, I decided to submit the following entry for their consideration:

“You just may be the most beautiful perp I’ve ever laid sensors on,” thought the robot lieutenant as his humanoid partner ate donuts unaware.

Turns out it was just the right level of awfulness, as it made the honorable mention section of the 2011 winners list. (There was some truly enjoyable badness in that year’s list of winning entries, as is usually the case; it’s always a fun list to read.)

Recently I discovered that my entry had been immortalized in a TV Tropes article about the contest. In two places, even! TV Tropes is a great site and it’s easy to get sucked into a rabbit hole reading about the various tropes. I got a big kick out of being mentioned there.

The 2024 Lyttle Lytton Contest will, for the first time, accept AI-generated submissions, such as those produced by ChatGPT. I don’t know if I’ll give that a try, but I figured this blog post could do with some AI-generated art at least, so I had Bing Image Creator work up a sketch featuring robots and donuts.