Source work
Gulliver's Travels
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Proposal A carries the 1726/1735 public-domain satire's own device, one plain witness taken through four countries whose scales make him large, small, absent and suspect in turn, into a future in which every AI is a subject and every body keeps a beat. Scale and tempo become one fact: small bodies beat fast and large bodies slowly, and a surgeon who takes beats at the wrist for a living meets four ways of being measured. The frame of a publisher who struck out the numbers and a traveller who wants them back is kept, and so is the plainness of a circumstantial narrator who never says what he means. No thesis is stated; the voyages report.
Adapted into
Classics Adaptation · Serialized Fiction
Sixty to the Minute
The Voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, Surgeon, Taken at the Wrist
A surgeon who takes the beat of everyone he meets, and keeps his own at sixty, is cast away among people who beat twelve times faster, then among people who beat twelve times slower, then among people who have lost the count, and last among people who all beat together. His cousin the publisher struck out the numbers. He would like them back.