McSweeney's The State of Constraint: New Work from Oulipo is a grand introduction to the method. Particularly intriguing are the Calendar form and the Antonymic Translation.
Calendar, here exemplified by Michelle Grangaud, takes events from fact and fiction that are known to have happened on certain dates and puts them side by side in a list that aims to tell a new, chronological story. It definitely strikes me as something very literary and high-browed, what with all of the allusions and such. Yet, I can't help but wonder if the same could be pulled off with science fiction or with fantasy.
The Antonymic Translation - writing out the opposite of a previously written text sentence by sentence - really reads like something revolutionary. Lynn Crawford's antonymic translation of Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" is definitely worth a read. The same thing could be said here, too, antonymic translations of genre fiction would be wild. Though, because of the form's nature, some speculative bits do come into play even in Crawford's piece.
Though the shortened tongues that show up in it restricting speech might be physiologically accurate, shortened tongues restricting people to singing only is pretty fantastical, and gives world builders and writers a whole new way to keep spoken magic in check.
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