Double pulse

Here we are on the cusp of summer, surfing a swell of fruit and flower on the eastern edge of San Fran­cisco Bay, and I am feeling very fully employed. Nice to expe­ri­ence that phys­i­cally as well as mentally; the other afternoon, I went down for a nap, basi­cally involuntary.

Mul­tiple streams of work are flowing. I go to sleep thinking about them, and then I dream about them.

These dreams aren’t unwelcome.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in June 2025. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

As usual, this newsletter has a few dis­tinct parts. Here’s what’s ahead:

• Moon­bound: in paper­back!

• Self-definition: expanded!

• Books: manga!

• Links and rec­om­men­da­tions: a few!

Moonbound

We love a well-made hard­cover book … 

 … but we love a per­fect-bound paper­back even more!

Dif­ferent kinds of books demand dif­ferent forms, sure. For the novel, the per­fect-bound paper­back is the ideal: tight, light, sturdy, economical.

With Moon­bound’s paper­back, Pic­ador makes a new gambit. As book­store shelves saturate, covers all glowing in Instagram-ready hues, this edi­tion shunts Na Kim’s cover into mono­chrome hyperspace. It’s so arresting on the shelf, it might as well be neon pink:

This paper­back edi­tion is bol­stered with a sub­stan­tial new appendix, which includes

• a lesson in the Sakescript,
• a primer on the economic theory of the Anth,
• a timeline linking our present to the events of Moonbound, and,
• SWORDS!

That’s my illustration; if you received the limited-edi­tion Moon­bound pre­order zine, you will recall its ghostly precursor. For this appendix, I decided to render the swords more dis­tinctly … and to render more of them!

Swords swords SWORDS!

I had tons of fun with this: all homage to the Tolkien-esque tools that make large-scale fic­tion so delicious.

Moon­bound’s ideal edi­tion is avail­able now. Owners of the hard­cover who just want to dip into the new mate­rial might con­sider reserving the library e-book.

The paper­back edi­tion is graced with fresh blurbs. Ban­nered across the cover you’ll find these kind words from Lev Grossman:

A mag­nif­i­cent quest wrapped in a bril­liant far-future vision? Yes, please. Moon­bound is a tour de force.

I’ve pre­vi­ously rec­om­mended Lev’s newsletter, Last Stop Corbenic, and I will now do so again: it com­bines nerdy eru­di­tion with bracing, almost scalding, honesty.

Here, he dis­cusses the origin of an Arthurian name:

She didn’t become Nimue — the name I tend to use — until rel­a­tively late in the day. Nimue appears for the first time in Caxton’s edi­tion of the Morte d’Arthur. BUT it’s worth noting that in the Win­chester Man­u­script of the Morte — which is prob­ably the closest one to Malory’s orig­inal text (though still not in his hand)—she appears not as Nimue but as Nynyve. She only becomes Nimue in the printed edi­tion, which sug­gests to me that the change was prob­ably a printer’s error. All those N’s and M’s and Y’s and U’s and V’s. It was bound to happen.

The printers, making the myths. Amazing.

Ann Leckie’s Ancil­lary Jus­tice was an impor­tant book for me, and there is for sure a little of her non­human nar­rator in my chronicler, so it was a great honor to have her assess Moon­bound in this way:

What a delight! I am very picky about my Arthurian retellings, but I very much enjoyed Sloan’s dif­ferent, slightly side­ways take. Your average Excal­ibur tale doesn’t come with far-future space­craft, organic superintelligences, and ani­mals who’ve devel­oped their own lan­guages and jus­tice sys­tems — but Moon­bound gives all that and more (including some great swords, too). This was my first foray into Robin Sloan’s lit­erary universe. I’ll be back for more.

SWORDS!

Pic­ador’s paper­back isn’t the only edi­tion newly avail­able … Moon­bound has recently appeared in German, as well:

That’s from Heyne, pub­lisher of Penumbra in Germany, with a trans­la­tion by Felix Mayer, who also pro­duced a recent German trans­la­tion of The Wizard of Oz—good com­pany!

Writer... and what else?

Thanks for your enthu­si­astic response to my online shop and the zines therein — it’s been a tremen­dous val­i­da­tion of a new (old) idea. And it prompts a recol­lec­tion.

Back in the late 2000s, I was working at Cur­rent TV in San Fran­cisco, writing little drafts of stories — barely stories — that I shared with two friends. This was the year before Annabel Scheme and the story that would become Penumbra. Back then, Twitter bios loomed large, and I can recall with per­fect sen­sory clarity where I was, and what I was feeling, as I added to mine the word “writer”, and clicked the button to con­firm the change. No one cared but me — yet these little per­tur­ba­tions in self-definition count for a lot, in the long run. They com­pound over time.

In the years that fol­lowed, “writer” grew from aspi­ra­tional to accurate, and nat­u­rally that descriptor head­lined my web­site: Robin Sloan, a fic­tion writer.

Lately, I have broad­ened the label — you can see it on the site—in recog­ni­tion of both (1) my work with the olive oil com­pany and (2) my ambi­tions for the print projects ahead.

Those two things are connected. Over the past couple of har­vest seasons, oper­ating the Fat Gold mill, I’ve been sur­prised to learn that my body and brain both respond pos­i­tively and pow­er­fully to this kind of work: ambulatory, tech­nical, a bit repetitive, cre­ative in the deep sense: some­thing emerges.

After my first season in the mill, I said to myself, “you ought to find a way to bring this kind of work into the rest of the year”, and the zines are part of my strategy. Dis­tinct from web publishing, which involves mainly hunching — I am hunched as I type this — printing involves a pro­gres­sion through stations, com­puter to Risograph, paper pile to work table, folding machine to label printer … fol­lowed, of course, by a walk to my beloved post office.

I’ve written before about the fuel of finishing — the way a com­pleted project, no matter the scope, works like a piston, cranking the engine of cre­ativity around again. Well, the sat­is­fac­tion of man­u­fac­turing real things turns out to be potent fuel, too. I don’t really have a theory about why that’s the case — this is just an empir­ical report. The work is working.

An epic of the editor

A brief but enthu­si­astic rec­om­men­da­tion for Tokyo These Days, a cap­ti­vating manga series from the leg­endary Taiyo Mat­sumoto, now avail­able in three tidy Eng­lish vol­umes.

Tokyo These Days is, very directly, an epic of the editor. It is peo­pled with artists — wacky and surly, prickly and charming, every­thing in between — but the char­acter at the center; the hero, unmistakably; is an editor.

The drama­ti­za­tion of this editor’s many relationships, cul­ti­vated over decades, is detailed and humane, funny and sad. More than once, this manga made me cry. It’s one of the most beau­tiful pieces of work I’ve encountered, in any medium, in many years, and for me it is ele­vated by the pre­ci­sion of its attention — the way Taiyo Mat­sumoto wants to insist: this job is cen­tral. This person is cen­tral. These people have been cen­tral, to me and my career.

Be careful reading this one, if you’re a young person — it might make you want to become an editor … 

Goes without saying, the art is impeccable, with loose, liquid sil­hou­ettes moving against pre­cise cityscapes; here is the freedom that comes from total tech­nical mastery. I’d love to draw like this. Incredible.

You might as well just buy all three vol­umes at once — you’ll read them in a day.

(Previously, I praised the anime adapted from Mat­sumoto’s ping-pong manga! )

Links and recommendations

Here is the trans­lator Jim Rion reviewing a new book about trans­la­tion:

Which, again, brings us back to reading. Because it is only by reading that the trans­lator knows what is vital in the text, what Searls some­times calls the “force” of it, to be able to bring it to the new audience. As such, rather than faith­ful­ness to any monumental, immutable “orig­inal,” trans­la­tion is always a ques­tion of how the trans­lator read, and how they man­aged to share their reading with their new audience.

I find this really provoca­tive and useful, gen­uinely new to me: trans­la­tion as the task of recreating a reading expe­ri­ence, rather than pro­cessing a text.

Here is Adam West­brook on the best comic he’s ever read. Lovely.

Here is a type­face designed to com­bine Thai and Latin scripts:

[The type­face] fea­tures high contrast, echoing Roman old-style type­faces, yet it is not a serif. It includes cur­sive nuances, yet it’s not an italic. It ges­tures toward Thai looped structures, but it’s not a looped type­face.

Seems to me that the bleeding edge of type design must, almost definitionally, be located where script sys­tems touch and overlap. This is super cool work.

The remark­ably cir­cular super­nova rem­nant pic­tured at the top of this newsletter is one of two cosmic mys­teries dis­cussed in a recent post on Cen­tauri Dreams. The other is a strange double pulse:

A closer look at these unusual observations: They con­sisted of two iden­tical pulses, with the star rapidly brightening, then decreasing in brightness, then increasing again, all in the frac­tion of a single second. The second pulse fol­lowed 4.2 sec­onds later in the case of HD 89389, and 1.3 sec­onds later at HD 217014. According to Stanton, in over 1500 hours of searching he had never seen a pulse like this, in which the star’s light is atten­u­ated by about 25 percent.

Note this: “This is much too fast to attribute to any known phe­nom­enon at the star’s distance. Light from a star a mil­lion kilo­me­ters across cannot be atten­u­ated so quickly.” In other words, some­thing on the scale of a star cannot par­tially dis­ap­pear in a frac­tion of a second, meaning the cause of this effect is not as dis­tant as the star. If the star’s light is mod­u­lated without some­thing moving across the field of view, then what process could cause this?

The spec­u­la­tion that fol­lows is fun and inter­esting!

Here is a great idea for a book! The Outer Periphery: Ama­teur Space­craft Designs from the U.S. Patent Office is

a col­lec­tion of over 75 patent illus­tra­tions for func­tioning space­craft and space­flight technologies, designed by amateurs, hobbyists, sci-fi enthusiasts, engineers, and cranks. Ranging from “somewhat plausible” to “completely off the wall,” these draw­ings beau­tifully cap­ture the delirious opti­mism of the space age. In the years between Sputnik and Challenger, sit­ting in your garage drafting a design for, say, a rotating space­craft that pro­duced an elec­tric dipole on four rotating spher­ical con­ducting domes seemed not just like an inter­esting hobby, but an oblig­a­tion to the future of humankind.

That’s written by Andy Sturdevant, pub­lished by the incom­pa­rable 50 Watts Books.

Here is some cool new sci­ence on the ther­mo­dy­namic spec­tacle of bird migra­tion:

During migra­tion season, many bird species become continent-spanning, high-endurance athletes. “They’re flap­ping their wings sev­eral times a second for up to eight hours at a time,” said Soren Coulson, who studies migra­tion phys­i­ology at the Uni­ver­sity of Memphis. For humans, an equiv­a­lent feat — say, run­ning non­stop without food, water or rest for days at a time — would be unimaginable.

“We were just amazed and inter­ested in how can these birds fly for thou­sands of miles without stopping, at a really high intensity, when most of us can barely run a 5K,” said Paulo Mesquita [ … ]

Listen, I appre­ciate human technology — am often thrilled by it — but/and nothing we’ve designed and built holds a candle to the yellow-rumped warbler.

Here’s a provo­ca­tion from W. David Marx: gen­er­a­tive AI is our polyester. He writes: “The best way to under­stand gen­er­a­tive AI art and aes­thetics is to con­sider how pre­vious ‘synthetics’ lost value in the long-run.”

Here’s a basic rule: a mate­rial is healthy to the degree that, when you see how it’s made, you don’t say “ugh” but rather “right on”. Plastic fails this test, obviously: the refineries in which these chem­i­cals are born are pure “ugh”.

Paper, though: right on! That’s a short video tour of the great French Paper, sup­plier of nearly all the stock I’ve printed on since 2017. French Paper is now owned by Finch Paper, which is owned in turn, alas, by a pri­vate equity giant … but the paper is still great.

I loved this post from Nick Sylvester, on music’s 0dBFS aesthetic: the beauty of dig­ital clipping, of what’s louder than loud.

Nick’s post men­tions Sleigh Bells, and I will report that the closest I, personally, have ever come to actual sen­sory over­load was a Sleigh Bells con­cert at the Rick­shaw Stop in San Fran­cisco circa 2011.

Here is Danny Castro on what vinyl asks of us. “It’s not just money, although it def­i­nitely asks for that, too”!

Where do you find the good stuff — especially for fic­tion — the weird little details of his­tory and the world?

Academic journals are a good place to start! (“An Inter­na­tional Journal on Charms, Charmers and Charming”!!) Go digging — mining — sifting. One single bizarro fact, one beau­tiful phrase, jus­ti­fies the entire expedi­tion.

I love the little nuggets of grace you find scat­tered in random com­ments on medium-sized mes­sage boards. From the com­mer­cial printing subreddit, a simple appreciation:

I am just thankful for color as part of our world.

Did you know the Library of Con­gress has a blog that happily reports what’s new online every month?

Here’s Danny Boyle on Sun­shine, a totally under­rated movie:

And, yes, I’m very happy Sun­shine exists. People love that movie … 

BOYLE: Yeah, but the movie did no busi­ness at all!

I bought a ticket. You have your money from me.

BOYLE: Thank you. Look, I love the film. I really love the film. Some of that film, I just think, “wow, did I do that?” It’s like, yeah you did! My daughter watched it a few years ago. I remember watching it, I was in the kitchen, but I’m watching bits of it, and I’m like, “oh, that’s quite good.” Because you get infected … not to make a pun … 

It is the theme of the day.

BOYLE: But you get infected by its [box-office] performance, and you think, “oh, people didn’t like it.” But then I meet people like you, and I meet a lot of people — and there are many films I’ve made people don’t think this about — but Sun­shine is one they really, gen­uinely think about and really love the film.

I am one of these people! Sun­shine is an all-time favorite.

Matt Webb:

We came onto the land and car­ried the salty sea with us in our bodies, del­i­cate parcels wrapped with cell membranes, and the swell and the wash remem­bered with each beat of our hearts, the dark ocean that was once our home still inside us, rocking us in its invis­ible waves.

Here is Walker Ryan on reading and skating. A great mind and a great heart.

“If the violin changed every six months, nobody would learn it.” I loved this talk from the dynamic Steve Krouse, and even blogged about it!

As I men­tion on the blog, Steve’s project Val Town has become an essen­tial tool for me. It’s a lightweight, joyful (!) plat­form for run­ning little snip­pets of code. (Well, mine just happen to be little — Val Town is happy to accept your large gobs of code, too.) Highly rec­om­mended for tin­kerers of all skill levels.

More from the YouTube lec­ture circuit!

I loved this recent talk by Scott Aaronson with the irre­sistible title How Much Math Is Knowable? This is crunchy, cosmic stuff — the kind of thinking that presses your brain up against the glass of reality. Delicious.

I risk repeating myself, but: every time you encounter some immis­er­ated little ten­dril of con­tem­po­rary politics, remember that somewhere, people are thinking thoughts like this.

The Cal­i­fornia energy grid con­tinues to trend utopian. Anth vibes.

I posted an AI-adjacent microfic­tion, homage to the useful genre refined weekly by Jack Clark.

A great public ser­vice from Lit Hub: here are some real book rec­om­men­da­tions based on those fake books that AI invented. (I was very pleased to find Sourdough on this list!)

Con­struc­tion Physics is such a ter­rific project. I’m in awe of the sheer mus­cu­larity of Brian Potter’s curiosity.

The newsletter of Bor­der­lands Books is a manda­tory subscription, if only for the plea­sure of its Over­heard in the Store:

“I don’t know what ‘half evil/half horse’ is, but it doesn’t sound good.”

“You can’t just go stealing other peoples’ growths.”

“We will now remove the com­pli­men­tary trilobites.”

“I hope that bat feels really ter­rible when I die of rabies.”

“For his next piercing, he should get a freakin’ lobotomy.”

“So the take­away from this is, furries, HOT … necrophilia, NOT!”

“Well, it’s not like I’m reading for infor­ma­tion.”

“Books are just like music in that way … some songs are for washing the dishes, and some are for curling up and crying.”

I’d given up hope the auto industry would pro­duce a vehicle for me, and it still might not, but at least this new com­pany Slate is going to try. They pro­pose to offer, by the end of 2026, an elec­tric pickup … priced under $30,000 … with two doors … AND NO SCREEN!!! I’m screaming. I’m waving my money in the air.

Bonus: Slate is head­quar­tered in Troy, Michigan, the city of my youth, where the public library was my imag­i­na­tive training ground.

Here is the great Rex Sor­gatz on the Public Domain Cin­e­matic Universe. (That’s an edi­tion of the essen­tial newsletter Why is this inter­esting?, char­acteristically fizzy and surprising.)

Here is the great Mat Honan on THE FOG—both of San Fran­cisco and of this moment in his­tory. A beau­tiful dispatch, per­fectly Mat Honan-ish.

Here is the great Kyle Chayka with fresh MEDIA THOUGHTZ—I can’t get enough!!

Here is the Ani­ma­tion Obsessive’s dispatch, basi­cally lit­erary in its pre­ci­sion and energy, from the Annecy ani­ma­tion festival.

The newsletter includes a link to this classic short from 1974, which achieves the cen­tral illu­sion of ani­ma­tion as pow­er­fully as any­thing I’ve ever seen. Those are just lines, yet they have WEIGHT — overwhelming weight!

Here is Alan Jacobs on the philoso­pher Alas­dair MacIntyre:

He was in his way a great wizard, and like Prospero, he has now broken his staff and drowned his book. May light per­petual shine upon him.

The lie at the center of the Jony and Sam video is that the coffee at Cafe Zoetrope is ter­rible.

M. John Harrison:

Bit wor­ried about the world at the moment. You don’t want to live in a world that looks as if it’s been invented for off-the-cuff satir­ical sci-fi circa 1971.

I like it when, in a dream, your dream-self artic­u­lates a cogent argument. It makes you feel like there might be some­thing solid there at the core.

In a recent dream, a reader (scraggly, with a sort of Hayden Christiansen-as-Anakin Sky­walker rat-tail thing happening) expressed to me his dis­ap­point­ment with Moon­bound for its per­ceived lack of sci-fi hardness. To which my dream-self replied: well, if there is, in this book, a bit of what you con­sider magic: there’s always a bit of magic. The absolute hardest sci-fi has it, too. Maybe those authors con­ceal it better, but it’s there.

Why con­ceal it? There’s magic in Moon­bound, and there’s super­hard sci-fi. There are beavers and dragons, a boy and a girl, a bel­lowing voice I stole from Jack London. There are SWORDS! You’ll find it all in the paper­back, avail­able now.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in early July.

June 2025