The breath of the gods

Tres­passers!

This edi­tion of my newsletter will be very short — all the meat is in the videos.

Scat­tered through the pages of Moon­bound, you’ll find scraps of a fic­tional script. It plays a part in the story, and it looks like this:

This script vibrates at the same fre­quency as the map on the novel’s first page: the require­ments of a genre, eagerly met. Its devel­op­ment involved a ton of research and refinement, and finally a fruitful col­lab­o­ra­tion with David Jonathan Ross—he of the Font of the Month Club!

Here’s a video laying out the whole process.

That link goes to YouTube. I have uploaded a dif­ferent ver­sion to the great algo­rithmic mills, where the breath of the gods upon a scrap of video can propel it (and its subject) (perhaps a book, newly published) onto thou­sands and thou­sands of phone screens.

I’ll now request your likes and/or comments — offerings to those capri­cious powers.

Instagram, I BESEECH THEE.

TikTok, ANSWER MY CALL!

You can also just open the video and let it loop a few times; the gods looove that.

With these two dis­tinct ver­sions, YouTube/horizontal and algo­rithmic/vertical, I acci­den­tally com­pleted an assign­ment for an imag­i­nary col­lege course on dig­ital rhetoric: Convey the same infor­ma­tion exactly, using two totally dif­ferent visual grammars … 

If meta media is your thing, sample both ver­sions. The contrast, almost a cross-platform moiré effect, will make you smile, and prob­ably also wince.

The smile, with the wince: that’s the overall expres­sion of the 2020s internet.

Just a few more things:

Here is new pro­file of me in Wired, boasting an extrav­a­gant head­line (!) and a selec­tion of phan­tas­magor­ical photos. As a 13-year-old in sub­urban Detroit, I pored over early issues of Wired; they were a trans­mis­sion from an alien planet, puz­zling and tan­ta­lizing in equal measure. It’s wild to find myself the object of that gonzo energy!

This sub­stan­tial con­sid­er­a­tion of Moon­bound by Cory Doc­torow is SO generous — and I will con­fess I glowed when he declared

This is doing fic­tion in hard mode, and Sloan nails it.

I had a lovely con­ver­sa­tion with the warm and wel­coming Sam Arbesman for his podcast.

I talked to Dan Shipper for his podcast which has the win­ning title “AI & I”; suitably, this one goes deep on Moon­bound’s AI themes and my expe­ri­ences with those tools, those materials.

I did a Q&A with Eliot Peper—there’s lots of craft-y talk in this one.

I was on Forum, the great public radio show of the San Fran­cisco Bay Area, and although Alexis Madrigal is a match­less voice (and I am pretty smart, too) the best part of the show — easily — by far — was the con­sid­er­a­tion of Moon­bound by ten-year-old Orion.

Alexis sets it up:

Society of the Double Dagger; Tres­passers on the Dragon Moon; listen to Orion’s assessment, and ask yourself, isn’t this THE reason to write books?

It is the reason!

The Moon­bound tour is rolling. If you live in or near Seattle, Berkeley, Raleigh, Brooklyn, Tulsa, Petaluma, or San Diego, mark your calendar. It would be great to see you out in the world.

While you can no longer receive a pre­order zine, you can still par­take in unrea­son­able cul­tural influ­ence by pur­chasing a copy of Moon­bound THIS WEEK. Please do so via Green Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

From Seattle! What a lovely town!

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in July, unless some­thing shocking emerges.

June 2024