You could
extinguish
a star

As a reader, I’m skep­tical of attempts to pin sen­sory expe­ri­ence to the page. The “better” the descrip­tive lan­guage, it seems to me, the more it actu­ally obscures the expe­ri­ence. That’s obvi­ously true when the lan­guage is flowery, but I believe it’s also true when the lan­guage is ultra-precise — so “perceptive” as to be show-offy. Notice me, noticing this.

There’s a bal­ance, of course, between (1) the lit­erary back­flip and (2) the cliché so dull it makes you doubt the writer expe­ri­enced any­thing at all. Writers seek that bal­ance — I seek it, some­times — and they miss it, and that’s okay; that’s the game.

This is all to say: the expe­ri­ence of a total solar eclipse is unsayable, impos­sible to capture. It blazes across every sen­sory channel. There’s sight and hearing, sure, but also time and temperature. Is boredom a sense? Anticipation? There’s cosmic proprioception: the pow­erful aware­ness of your posi­tion in space.

I mean, the shim­mering photos are gorgeous … but, having now expe­ri­enced the real thing, I under­stand that they do not depict a total eclipse. Not at all.

The total eclipse (I have learned) is not “an image in the sky” but “a process in the world”. That’s a cool and pre­cious thing, here and now in the 21st century. In its shocking recal­i­bra­tion of scale, in its mega­band­width sat­u­ra­tion of the senses, “see eclipse” might be the ulti­mate expres­sion of “touch grass”.

After totality, my nephew, age 10, said it best: “I feel bad for the gamers.”

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 April 2024. 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 update: a new note on the mini-site; title theory

• A comic book parable: I’ve never stopped thinking about this

• Links and recommendations: an inter­stellar croissant; the world’s best news­paper

Moonbound update

It is time to pre­order my new novel Moon­bound, if you haven’t already! This is an adven­ture that cross-fades fan­tasy with sci­ence fiction, comfy myth with dizzy spec­u­la­tion. Its nar­rator rep­re­sents a maturation, or fruition, of the voice I’ve used in my pre­vious novels — related, of course, to this voice right here — and it plays some POV tricks that I believe are gen­uinely new in fiction.

You can pre­order Moon­bound any­where books are sold, and you can do it in any format, print or dig­ital or audio. After you do, for­ward your con­fir­ma­tion email to pre­order@robinsloan.com and, in May, I’ll mail you a copy of a lim­ited-edi­tion zine full of world­building clues. Yes, in the real phys­ical mail!

I’ll only print this zine once. Save it and sell it on eBay in 2029.

Housekeeping:

• If your mailing address is not included in the order con­fir­ma­tion, simply add it to the top of the for­warded email.

• Readers out­side the U.S. have more lim­ited options for pre­ordering, but I do believe a cer­tain leviathan retailer will, in most places, promise you a copy. If you can get Moon­bound pre­ordered, by hook or by crook, I’ll mail you a zine!

I’ve added a new note to my Moon­bound mini-site; this time, it’s about the great one herself, Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve long admired one of her tricks in par­tic­ular — oh, it’s a good trick — and now I’ve stolen it for myself.

Note that, regarding the bal­ance I men­tioned above — the use of descrip­tive lan­guage with high pre­ci­sion but/and zero distraction — Ursula K. Le Guin made it look easy.

Take a look and appre­ciate her along with me.

For a long time, I’ve cul­ti­vated a per­sonal theory of naming. It goes like this:

When you name some­thing, you label the thing; frame it. This is an impor­tant job, before anyone has actu­ally encoun­tered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. The thing’s spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics and its performance — its great success, we hope — fill the vessel of its name, which was pretty empty all along. Instead of the name defining the thing, the thing (re)defines the name. This hap­pens with companies, with works of art, with people themselves.

So, when naming some­thing, while it’s impor­tant to choose an appealing label, it’s prob­ably more impor­tant to choose a vessel of suf­fi­cient capacity.

This is why the names Star Wars and Star Trek, both of which are objec­tively stupid, have been so successful: their very bland­ness leaves them capacious.

That’s impor­tant to under­stand! Names can be totally stupid. Apple? YouTube? Spider-Man? SPIDER-MAN?? Those labels glow with meaning and power, and it’s not because of the words.

Any name can work, as long as it doesn’t get in the way.

In retrospect, I believe the title I chose for my second novel, Sourdough, did get in the way. I believe it actu­ally hurt the book! The wound was not fatal — Sourdough con­tinues to rise, finding new readers every day — but, even now, the label pro­vides not an entice­ment or even a blank invi­ta­tion but a flash of warning. (This will sound simplistic, but, honestly, it is not great for a novel’s title to promise a “sour” expe­ri­ence … )

I had all of this in mind when I was naming this new project.

I’d col­lected sev­eral candidates, and I liked them all, but only as the titles of stand­alone novels. They didn’t stretch or scale; they had no metonymic potential, a la Three-Body Problem (which is not actu­ally the name of the series, except, it totally is) or Game of Thrones (ditto). That lim­i­ta­tion sent me hunting, and my hunt deliv­ered me to Moon­bound, which I think is terrific.

At the same time, I feel totally insulated: because if it’s actu­ally stupid, that’s fine. In fact, stupid might be better, because that means it’s an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with every­thing that bursts out of this book, and the books to come.

Star Wars! YouTube! MOONBOUND!

The parable of Cable

I’ve read super­hero comics for most of my life, but never with the inten­sity of my early teens. This was during the great comic book spec­u­la­tion bubble of the 1990s; I remember pur­chasing sev­eral copies of the issue depicting Superman’s death, absolutely sure that I was securing my col­lege education.

I mean: ABSOLUTELY sure.

There’s a story from the comics of that era that never left me. In my per­sonal cosmology, it’s become almost a parable, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Here’s my version, as neatly as I can tell it. I am going to elide many details, mostly clone-related, but they don’t change the essen­tial shape or feeling.

To begin: two of the X-Men get married!

Beloved char­ac­ters rooted in the mutant team’s first appearance, way back in 1963. A happy occasion; a sto­ry­line maturing. Soon, they have a son.

Their child is a mutant, too, and there are hints that his powers will mirror his mother’s: telepathy and telekinesis.

A twist!

The child is cap­tured by one of the X-Men’s greatest foes, who infects him with a techno-organic virus that begins to trans­form his living cells. Soon, it will turn him into a sort of techno-zombie; think of the Borg, from Star Trek.

His par­ents launch a des­perate rescue mission. Success! Their foe is defeated. Their son, however, is still infected, and no one, not even the X-Men, has a cure for the techno-organic virus.

Until!

A friendly emis­sary from the dis­tant future indi­cates that, in her time, the child can be saved. She offers to take him, but it will be a one-way trip. His par­ents will never see their child again.

They send their son to his salvation … 

 … which is not technological — some exotic antidote — but mental. In the future, the child is trained to apply his mutant powers to his own body, using telekinesis to hold the techno-organic virus in check.

For a less gifted mutant, this wouldn’t be an option. But this child’s powers, it turns out, are off the charts. In the future, an ally assesses his innate potential:

Telepathically, you are strong enough to sense a stray thought a con­ti­nent away. Telekinetically, you could extin­guish a star with some­thing less than a con­scious effort.

But he won’t do any of that, because every iota of those powers, every scrap of that gift, will be con­sumed by the task before him. The ally explains that living with the virus “will mean sac­ri­ficing your other abilities”—the ones we just heard about — “[and] lit­er­ally fighting on a cel­lular level every day of your life, making sure you live to see the next dawn.”

This par­tic­ular comic was pub­lished in 1994, so I was 14 — a good age, I think, to get hit with this kind of story. This kind of analogy.

The boy grows up, and although his mutant powers are fully occu­pied, his normal body and brain are free to develop. He becomes a soldier, crafty and formidable — a sort of futur­istic Odysseus. His code­name is Cable.

Eventually, of course (OF COURSE), Cable travels back in time, not just once but over and over again. It’s a whole thing. When he meets his par­ents, they are still grieving the loss of their young son. The son, meanwhile, has gray hair, glit­tering cyborg prostheses.

There’s lots more to it — decades of nar­ra­tive embroidery; a sur­feit of clones — but this is the core: “You could extin­guish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occu­pied by the task of living.

The thing I appre­ciate about this story — this parable — is that it cuts a mil­lion dif­ferent ways.

Isn’t poverty the techno-organic virus, and aren’t mil­lions of people on this planet the mutant marvels, all their incan­des­cent capa­bility occu­pied by the stress of sur­viving day to day?

Isn’t your crappy diet the techno-organic virus, and your human body the mutant marvel, all its incred­ible meta­bolic powers bent to the task of keeping you alive, without being fed a single vegetable?

Isn’t the post-1970s pol­i­tics of the U.S. the techno-organic virus, and this country’s deep cre­ativity the mutant marvel, all our world-historic wealth and inge­nuity bogged down by the struggle to keep this thing from going off the rails?

You can imagine more vari­a­tions yourself. In any version, what’s remark­able is that, even beneath such a burden: life con­tinues. Buoyed by fan­tastic powers within.

I don’t mean to be glib, com­paring comic book oper­atics to real-world suffering. It’s just that this story has been in my head since I was a teenager, and I have so often found the analogy clarifying.

I really do believe the United States is a mutant marvel — a nation that invented a new way of being a nation; one in which equality and autonomy are not inher­ited or earned but rather simply: available—and I also believe that we are presently “fighting on a cel­lular level every day”. I think that’s been true for decades. It was true when I was reading these comic books.

Only a country of incred­ible capacity could have made it so far, so successfully, through bull­shit so ridiculous.

If this story was just Superman pow­er­less beneath a red sun, it wouldn’t have the same resonance. A light switch is not inter­esting. The key to the parable of Cable is the dynamic process. This story is about the reser­voir con­stantly filling, draining just as fast. It is about the bal­ance that is sus­tain­able, actu­ally — and the real­iza­tion that pow­erful forces churn beneath the sur­face of every sus­tain­able bal­ance.

The parable has been, for me, a source of empathy. I have known many Cables in my life: people pro­foundly gifted, those gifts con­sumed entirely. And it’s not that those are sad stories. Cable is a super­hero! Many the people I’m thinking about did fine; are doing fine. Yet in that “fine”, there is titanic effort; con­stant vigilance.

“You could extin­guish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occu­pied by the super­heroic task of living.

There’s another story here, sig­nif­i­cantly less res­o­nant but still noteworthy, about how this par­tic­ular comic book char­acter started out pretty stupid, then became more and more inter­esting, thanks to layers of cre­ativity and humanity added by dif­ferent writers and artists over time.

Indeed: Cable’s pathos quickly became a core ele­ment of X-mythology. Even in the mid-1990s, I wasn’t reading the orig­inal comics (cited above), but rather flash­backs and retellings. That’s how super­hero comics work, after all: events are sealed into the canon through lay­ered repetition, like lacquerwork.

There’s nothing else in the cre­ative land­scape quite like it.

Links and recommendations

Here is a short piece I wrote for the Atlantic about my favorite sub­ject 😋

I didn’t go deep on this in the Atlantic piece, because I am not a pro wrestling expert, or even that much of a fan, BUT, AND, I do love the “heel turn”: the way a wrestler (like The Rock) will become a villain, with grace and glee, for the sake of the larger story. The way everyone is in on the joke; the way everyone — the fans especially — plays their part. Kayfabe!

Pro wrestling, prop­erly understood, is a hyper-stylized art form — a cul­tural treasure — right up there with com­media dell’arte and Noh.

Here is my pre­vious approach to the same sub­ject: my Pro­posal for a Book to Be Adapted into a Movie Star­ring Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

If you’d like to see a slightly dif­ferent flavor of pro wrestling — one that draws com­par­isons not only to theater, but also to dance — watch a few min­utes of this match between Will Ospreay and Marty Scurll.

For plan­ning purposes, here is NASA’s Five Mil­len­nium Canon of Solar Eclipses, run­ning from 1999 B.C.E. to 3000 C.E., cal­cu­lated by Fred Espenak and Jean Meeus. Even if you can’t make it to Min­neapolis for the total solar eclipse in 2245, their introduction is fun and bracing. A lot of very fiddly details go into cal­cu­la­tions cov­ering this many centuries.

In my pre­vious edi­tion, I linked to an appre­ci­a­tion of Iain M. Banks and his Cul­ture novels. Here is a vin­tage clip of Banks giving a tour of his home office.

What a dude. What a spirit.

Here is a dis­cus­sion of the heliosphere, the region of space where the sun’s glow bal­ances against incoming inter­stellar radiation, pro­tecting the solar system from killer high-energy particles, making life pos­sible. (The parable of Cable again!?)

Here’s one pos­sible rendering, like an inter­stellar croissant:

Here is the 21st-century ice cream truck! I love the light­ness of this approach — it runs on text messages, without any cum­ber­some app.

(That’s an edi­tion of Kristen Hawley’s Expedite newsletter, which is terrific — I’m a devoted paying subscriber.)

I believe the Financial Times is the world’s best news­paper. The name is a bit of a fake out; the paper ranges widely beyond finance, with an out­look that is expan­sive and liberal, in every sense. The FT was the first news­paper to add CLIMATE as a top-level section: a stake in the ground.

Added ben­efits:

• The FT is an active, com­pre­hen­sive news organization, BUT, AND, it does not operate at the fre­netic pace of, e.g., the modern New York Times or Wash­ington Post. You’re welcome!

• The expense of the sub­scrip­tion is such that you will feel com­pelled to cancel any others. You’re welcome!!

• You will enjoy the hau­teur of the salmon pink background.

• You will be res­cued from the myopic vortex of U.S. pol­i­tics.

Here are David Jonathan Ross’s notes on Indoor Kid, the latest addi­tion to his Font of the Month Club. (I am a long­standing member.) This is a type­face for comic book lettering, and I love the extra con­sid­er­a­tions here:

In addi­tion to my stan­dard char­acter set, you’ll find some extra goodies in the glyph set such as breath marks, stars, hearts, and musical notes that are some­times found in manga.

I swapped out the type­face I use for titles on my web­site, and I am obsessed with the new challenger: Kyrios, from ArrowType. It hews to my pref­er­ence for modern blackletter, but runs a little gooey, almost psychedelic, and … I LOVE IT

Here is a brows­able data­base of useful num­bers in biology. It’s fun to read them backward, unit to value to definition, Carnac the Magnificent-style:

Seconds … 0.1 to 0.4 … the average dura­tion of a human eye blink!

Nanometers … 2 … the average radius of a folded protein! Naturally.

Here are mini rope bridges built for mice.

In the time since I last enthused about A Good Used Book, they’ve opened a phys­ical bookstore in Los Angeles! The space looks fab­u­lous. LA residents, you must drop in. For non-residents (like me) it’s still great fun to follow their impec­cable Instagram account: a parade of fash­ion­able book buyers, and plenty of inter­esting finds offered directly. Send a DM to stake your claim; they’ll shoot back a Shopify checkout link. Couldn’t be easier.

I’ve pur­chased per­haps a dozen books from these folks over the past couple years. Here’s my latest acquisition, snagged via DM recently:

The U.S. edi­tion of M. John Harrison’s anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, is coming soon from Saga Press!

This is new to me: Green’s Dic­tio­nary of Slang, “the largest his­tor­ical dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish slang”, an ambi­tious web project.

If you’re on a reg­ular computer, check out the hover state on that alphabet strip; I’ve never seen a UI ele­ment quite like it.

This project leaps onto the shelf along­side the Online Ety­mo­log­ical Dic­tio­nary, a.k.a. Ety­mon­line; these are the sweetest fruits of the World Wide Web. I con­sult Ety­mon­line once a week, minimum, and it pro­vides a fab­u­lous tran­sect through his­tory and cul­ture every time.

Don Bluth’s garage

A recent edi­tion of The Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive dis­cusses the dynamics of Don Bluth’s departure, along with many other animators, from Disney. I remember watching Don Bluth-directed movies in the 1980s and 1990s — The Secret of NIMH! An Amer­ican Tail! — but I didn’t really know any­thing about this backstory. The par­tic­ulars are, it turns out, sur­prising and inspiring.

At Disney, the 1970s were a time of transition. The leg­endary Nine Old Men were Get­ting Very Old Indeed, but the reins hadn’t prop­erly been passed:

Bluth and many of the other young trainees didn’t know how to make a movie, and they weren’t sure how to learn. According to Bluth’s col­league Gary Goldman, “We didn’t even know what ques­tions to ask.”

Here’s Don Bluth, speaking in the 1970s:

I was watching The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice part of Fan­tasia recently and I mar­veled to Ken Anderson, one of the veterans, about the water. It was so transparent. So wet. I asked Ken how they did it. … The man who cre­ated that water is long gone, Ken told me, and no one ever did get around to writing the process down. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. “We’ve never gotten it that way again.”

So, even before leaving Disney,

Bluth started a side project. An inde­pen­dent car­toon made with inde­pen­dent equipment. In his garage.

The pic­tures of this garage studio, reproduced in The Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive, are fab­u­lous — totally evocative.

[The side project] turned into “an under­ground ani­ma­tion campus.” [ … ] The learning envi­ron­ment proved magnetic — many Disney staffers came through to work part-time. Ani­mator Linda Miller remem­bered that she “wanted to learn more about filmmaking … and it also seemed more exciting than the projects that Disney was working on.”

It keeps going:

Gradually, the pro­duc­tion (and the rows of work desks) out­grew Bluth’s garage and took over his whole Culver City home. Guedel recalled that Bluth “lit­er­ally lived with only his own single bed and a dresser in his small bedroom”—every other space “was filled with ani­ma­tion equipment.”

Isn’t that just a dream? It sounds like a 2000s tech startup, except with a dif­ferent polarity — a dif­ferent goal. The whole story is hugely energizing. I didn’t know any­thing about it, and I’m grateful to The Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive for the careful doc­u­men­ta­tion here.

So remember! What­ever your age, what­ever your pro­fes­sional status, there is always this option: opening the garage, inviting people in, learning some­thing new.

You know, I feel like some of my neigh­bors at Pixar (about a mile from where I’m typing this) might presently ben­efit from an extracur­ric­ular garage project … 

In what has become a familiar pattern, I was intro­duced to Ohara Koson’s shin-hanga (“new prints”) work through Fat Gold. We used another charismatic monkey print on a magnet back in December.

Here’s a note from Ety­mon­line’s creator:

Spring is har­binger season. None of the other sea­sons seem to have har­bingers. Spring is lousy with them, wall to wall har­bingers. It’s a bit unexpected.

From the lab,

Robin

April 2024