The entrepreneur & the historian

Trespassers! As I’m writing this, Moon­bound is just one week away. It always feels like this: you wait, and wait, and wait … and sud­denly it’s here. Already??

I’ve updated my book tour itinerary with exact times and event links.

Later in this edition, you’ll find my notes on Moon­bound the audio­book. Before we get to that, I want to men­tion two events in par­tic­ular, because I’m very excited about my inter­locutors.

June 10, San Francisco: the entrepreneur

On Monday, June 10, at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Fran­cisco, I’ll be joined by Mike Krieger. Mike is the co-founder of Insta­gram who served as CTO for many years before decamping to start new ventures. He has very recently joined Anthropic, one of the three or four leading AI labs, as Chief Product Officer.

Mike is also, more ger­manely to our pur­poses here, a serious and vora­cious reader.

I met him years ago, when I myself played inter­locutor to the great Nick Hark­away at Book­shop West Portal. Mike was in the audi­ence that night, and we chatted a bit. I’ve fol­lowed him around the internet ever since, and have noted well his con­sis­tent engage­ment with books, par­tic­u­larly fiction, par­tic­u­larly sci­ence fiction.

I’m delighted that Mike agreed to join me for this launch. I can’t wait to hear his thoughts about Moon­bound, and answer his ques­tions, and per­haps pose a few of my own.

The path to Moon­bound took me through many exper­i­ments with AI, ini­tially with the hope that I might use those tools to actually write something. It didn’t work out that way — I could go on for hours about why — but/and what did make it into this novel was a real engage­ment with “the grain of the material”: the math under­pin­ning these AI lan­guage models; their logistics; their lineage.

That’s all to say, someone like Mike — canny reader, top-tier technologist — is the per­fect partner for this conversation, about this book, in this place.

San Fran­cisco! — which in Moon­bound is described as: “the city the future reached back and made, because it was going to be needed.”

June 17, Brooklyn: the historian

On Monday, June 17, at Green­light Books in Brooklyn, I’ll be joined by Dan Bouk. Dan is one of my oldest and closest co-conspirators; with a clutch of friends at Michigan State, we founded a stu­dent lit­erary magazine, and in the decades (!?) since, Dan and I have basi­cally never stopped talking.

Dan is now a cel­e­brated his­to­rian who roams the intel­lec­tual byways lifting cloaks of boringness. He writes about the his­tory of ideas, and of capitalism; he does so — not uniqely among his­to­rians, but, well … close to uniquely — with lan­guage that is ele­gant and playful. Reading Dan is, quite simply, FUN.

He’s also my MCD labelmate! Dan’s book about the 1940 U.S. Census was a sur­prise hit, with reviews that all took the same gen­eral form: It doesn’t seem like this sub­ject should be inter­esting … like, AT ALL … but somehow Dan Bouk makes it awesome??

On top of all that, Dan is a lively and engaging public speaker — so we have here a recipe for a really spe­cial conversation. New Yorkers, please come out and join us!

An appendix grows

Recent addi­tions to my Moon­bound mini-site:

• Some­thing I think more (most?) books should provide: a pro­nun­ci­a­tion guide, com­plete with audio clips. This is spoiler-y terrain, so I have by default con­cealed the Things One Might Wonder How to Pronounce. You can reveal them gradually, as you make your way through the book … or all at once, as I prob­ably would 😈

• Con­tin­uing my series of appreciations: a note about Susan Cooper and the power of the checklist.

• Finally, a chron­icle of my struggle with a ques­tion ger­mane to most fan­tasy fiction, cer­tainly the kind that unfolds on a weird-shaped map: where the fuck is this sup­posed to be??

As a reminder, I don’t really intend for you to read all of this right away — although you should feel free to dig in! Rather, I’ve been delib­er­ately assem­bling this mini-site as a dig­ital appendix to the book — one that I hope will serve Moon­bound’s readers not just in June 2024, but for years to come.

Finding our voice

Moon­bound’s nar­rator doesn’t have a gender. This isn’t lit­erary elision; the char­acter isn’t human. On the page, this works great (IMHO!) but there are for­mats without pages. An audio­book — the fastest-growing format in book publishing, if you didn’t already know — requires a real human voice.

Elishia Mer­ricks at Macmillan directed Moon­bound the audio­book. At the outset, she posed the inter­esting ques­tion: what kind of voice did I imagine for this book?

Let me tell you how I came to an answer, and by exten­sion a bit about modern audio­book production.

In lit­erary terms, I never really disappear. I have put myself plainly into this nar­rator; that’s true of all my nar­rators, in all my books. They are char­acters, sure, but/and they are also just: me. And, I will confess … I saw myself as a con­tender for this audio­book gig, so there was per­haps some strategy in it, when I told Elishia I imag­ined Moon­bound’s voice to be mas­cu­line.

Together, we selected a couple of pas­sages for audi­tions. One was packed with dif­ferent char­acters, to test a performer’s ability to keep them distinct. Another thrummed with emotion, to test their range.

I recorded one of these audi­tions myself; the others, Elishia gath­ered from her net­work.

A few days later, pre­sented with a bundle of audi­tions, two things were apparent:

1. Mine was the worst! Listen: I’m a fine reader … but the power and clarity of the pro­fes­sionals was on another level. Another planet.

2. These voices … did not quite … sound right.

That second reac­tion sent me scur­rying back to a few early readers, who I asked: “Hey, uh, when you read Moon­bound, how did you hear the nar­rator’s voice in your head?” From sev­eral of them, a firm answer came: oh, it was a woman.

(Kathryn invoked the name of Shohreh Aghdashloo, to which — I mean — swoon.)

Elishia went back to her net­work and returned with fresh voices, fresh audi­tions. All of them were terrific — seriously, there are some won­derful per­formers out there — but/and one in par­tic­ular knocked our socks off. Gabra Zackman was instantly and unques­tionably our voice.

Here’s a clip of Moon­bound the audio­book, the opening lines of the first chapter:

The entire audio­book process was a blast. Using a hilar­i­ously spe­cialized web app, I attached pro­nun­ci­a­tions to my roster of weird names. (This expe­ri­ence became part of the moti­va­tion for my own pro­nun­ci­a­tion guide.) We audi­tioned music and chose some cool, moody cues for the book’s five parts. There’s a song in the text — set in italics, Tolkien-style, both homage and, I’ll be honest, light satire — for which I recorded a mean­dering melody.

The final production, with Gabra Zackman’s per­for­mance directed by Elishia Mer­ricks and edited by Chris Howerton, is canon­ical peer to the print edition. This Moon­bound lacks a map; instead, it has music. In Moon­bound the audio­book, you don’t get to see the wizard-ish glyphs; instead, you get to hear Gabra’s vir­tu­osic voicing.

I’ve been imag­ining an alter­nate time­line in which, after hearing those first audi­tions, we didn’t take a step back; in which we ended up with a mas­cu­line voice, rich and res­o­nant and, well, a bit boring. It would have been fine. Really! But this audio­book is so far beyond fine … it’s truly spe­cial, and I feel lucky that we arrived here together.

(A word to the wise: if you, like me, tend to rely on your public library for audio­books, remember that can you go searching for Moon­bound right now in the Libby app — for the audio­book, the e-book, or both — and make your interest known by selecting the notify me tag. Those tags, in suf­fi­cient quantity, can encourage librar­ians to acquire the book. We love that!)

Isn’t “inter­locutor” a great word? Right up there with “amanuensis”. I don’t think it gets much use out­side of book tours, these days. I’m a fre­quent inter­locutor for authors vis­iting the San Fran­cisco Bay Area, and I always relish the assignment, but/and, it’s great to once again be the one interlocuted.

From the city the future reached back and made, because it was going to be needed,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter just as Moon­bound hits the shelves!

June 2024