Robin Sloan
main newsletter
June 2024

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:

A picture of a lefty writing chunky, calligraphic characters -- not recognizable as any human script -- on a sheet of plain graph paper.
Sakescript

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 moirĂ© 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