Finisher

The olive har­vest has concluded! The Fat Gold mill is disassembled, whirling blades and twisting augers all laid out like the bones of a high-tech dinosaur. Our work con­tinues: we are packing and ship­ping orders every day, and we’ll con­tinue right up until the solstice, after which: rest.

And then: Gawain!

As many of you know, I present a live reading, every year, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the great, weird, rol­licking 14th-century adven­ture whose author is lost to time. Previously, I’ve used Simon Armitage’s trans­la­tion, which is what intro­duced me to the poem. This year, out of curiosity, and for variety, I’ll instead read the trans­la­tion pro­duced by an obscure philol­o­gist named J. R. R. Tolkien.

The live stream will start on YouTube on Jan­uary 1, 2025, at 10 a.m. Pacific Time / 1 p.m. Eastern Time / 6 p.m. Green­wich Mean Time.

The reading is always a ton of fun, and this year will bring fresh rhythms, per­haps some tricky new twists of the tongue. This is your first and last advisory — I hope you’ll join me. You can set a reminder on the YouTube page.

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

• Moon­bound news: M2!

• Media the­o­rizing: let’s stew together

• Links and rec­om­mendations: Het Spel van Westing, Master and Com­mander, Mk.gee, and more

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 December 2024. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

Hey, you all really clicked the links in my 2024 gift guide! Many of the items I rec­om­mended are now sold out (including the Fat Gold gift set, amazing) but/and plenty of inter­esting, nour­ishing stuff remains.

Here is one late-breaking gift advisory:

I placed a big order with Enzo’s Table, and they were kind enough to slip in a couple of bonus items. One of these was a package of their English toffee, which I must now report to be: nar­cot­i­cally good. I have not his­tor­i­cally been a toffee-enjoyer, but this stuff … I just don’t know! It’s not too sweet! Nice and salty! SO MANY NUTS!

Anyway, the bar of toffee they sent, though it was not small, is all gone now. I rec­om­mend this substance as a super-classic stocking stuffer and/or treat for the last week of the year.

Moonbound news

What a year for Moon­bound! Thank you for your warm reception, and espe­cially for the notes and reac­tions that con­tinue to stream in. It remains aston­ishing that work of this kind can be granted so many hours of people’s atten­tion — and not only atten­tion but imagination, co-creation: of the beavers in their bog, the Wyrm in her Well. If you’ve read the novel, you cre­ated those things as much as I did. If you haven’t … what can I say, other than, what a shame, not to have walked the streets of Rath Varia; not to have felt the roar of the Altamira’s descent … not to have met Clovis!

They’re all waiting patiently.

More mini-essays are coming to the mini-site—on Philip Pullman and Hayao Miyazaki and more. It is a living document: an organic com­panion that will expand along­side this project for years to come.

I told you that the shape of my year means it’s “pencils down” through Christmas. Well, starting in Jan­uary, it is “pencils up”—no one says that, do they? — and com­po­si­tion will com­mence on the next book in the Moon­bound series.

All my notes call it simply M2, so we’ll use that code­name here.

M2 is plotted out, many of its major sequences vivid in my imagination, so this will be a season of Get­ting It Down. I’m excited — absolutely raring to go.

Meanwhile, Moon­bound’s paper­back edi­tion will arrive in 2025 and, char­ac­ter­istic of an MCD publication, it has sur­prises in store. More to come.

Media, part 1

Here is some the­o­rizing on the present and future of media for you to stew in, and with, over the hol­iday. My word choice is pointed: I believe the sit­u­a­tion calls pre­cisely for stewing: contemplation, reflection, deep strategy.

To begin: three dif­ferent assess­ments from three dif­ferent writers, all of which seem to “rhyme” in an inter­esting way.

i.

I loved Max Read’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Substackers as “textual YouTu­bers for Gen Xers and Elder Mil­len­nials who hate watching videos.” He is so good at this: the gimlet tag, pre­cise and uncom­fort­able in equal measure.

Max con­tinues:

What I mean by this is that while what I do resem­bles jour­nal­istic writing in the spe­cific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type pod­caster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one excep­tion being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most suc­cessful Sub­stacks offer to sub­scribers is less a series of dis­crete and self-sup­porting pieces of writing — or, for that matter, a spe­cific and tightly delim­ited sub­ject or concept — and more a par­tic­ular atti­tude or perspective, a set of pas­sions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which sub­scribers are invited. This means you have to be pretty com­fort­able having a strong voice, offering rel­a­tively strong opinions, and just gen­er­ally “being the main character” in your writing. And, indeed, all these qual­i­ties are more impor­tant than any kind of par­tic­ular tech­nical writing skill: Many of the world’s best (formal) writers are not com­fort­able with any of those things, while many of the world’s worst writers are extremely com­fort­able with them.

ii.

Con­nect that to the clear-eyed new rules of media from Kyle Chayka and One Thing, which begins like this … 

1. Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

 … and con­tinues as a series of shaped charges that neatly demolish any lin­gering hope that We Can Keep Doing What We’ve Been Doing, where “We” is approx­i­mately Max’s Elder Mil­len­nials who hate watching videos, and “What We’ve Been Doing” is approx­i­mately, well, this.

iii.

Tex­tual YouTuber Sam Valenti IV extends the survey to music:

How I per­ceived Charli’s comment, after my late Gen-X knee-jerk annoy­ance subsided, is not that music doesn’t matter, but that music simply isn’t enough on its own to pen­e­trate mass cul­ture [ … ] To do that, you need a mass media-backed nar­ra­tive (“brat” as buzzword), celebrity asso­ci­a­tion (Charli’s MCU level amal­ga­ma­tion of other industries, rolling up Chloë Sevigny, Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox, etc.), and a bat­tery of well-made “assets” (to use music industry speak) with which to roll it all out. In short, a loot drop that almost no inde­pen­dent artist can wield. The game is not a fair fight, unsurprisingly.

His whole assess­ment is canny and, yes, a little bit crushing.

It’s all very desta­bi­lizing and dispiriting … and yet, lodged in the jaws of the wolf, there is a pearl of hope, if you can snatch it:

1. Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult.

Yes: and every­thing has always been a cult.

If you think that word has neg­a­tive connotations, squelch them; make the label, for a moment, per­fectly neutral. I’ve long believed that cults are cen­tral to books: their his­tory and longevity. It is no acci­dent that the plot of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore revolves around a secretive, long-lived organization.

Who are the scholars of a novel like Ulysses, if not a cult? Who are the readers of Marvel comics, if not a cult? What is it to claim that any work is part of a canon, if not to say, it has a for­mi­dable cult?

The error is assuming cult mem­ber­ship must be exclusive. All of us, pre­oc­cu­pied by media in all its forms, we are mem­bers of many cults — dozens, hun­dreds — with densely over­lap­ping mem­ber­ships.

A work of art is nothing without its cult! Lit­er­ally nothing. Inert marks on pages closed to the light; derelict bits in the coldest region of the database.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 14th-century com­po­si­tion that I’ll read on New Year’s Day: the man­u­script existed for CENTURIES, passed from col­lec­tion to col­lec­tion, never read, never enjoyed. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the poem was rediscovered, it value recognized — both its his­tor­ical sig­nif­i­cance and the pure vis­ceral fun of it.

Since then, the Green Knight has gath­ered his cult. High Cultist Armitage ini­ti­ated me with his gal­loping trans­la­tion in 2009. What is my annual reading, if not a recruit­ment drive?

That’s all to say, cults: yes. They have been necessary, at all times in all places, for the long-term trans­mis­sion of art of any/every kind. Maybe the difference, here and now in the short 2020s, is that you need one right from the start.

If you read just one of the pieces linked above, make it Kyle’s, which matches its prac­tical prog­nosis to a limber curiosity. His new rules are rich ingre­di­ents for the stew that com­mences … now.

Media, part 2

Some­time I think that, even amidst all these rup­tures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the plat­forms and insti­tu­tions that sup­port the fin­ishing of things, and those that don’t.

Fin­ishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Fin­ishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invi­ta­tion is persistent; permanent. (Again, think of the Green Knight, waiting on the shelf for four hun­dred years.) Pos­terity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING.

There is no invi­ta­tion in the floppy archive of a social media account, or, hello, an email newsletter. Past their expi­ra­tion date (approx­i­mately 72 hours after the most recent post) each constitutes, basically, a pile of garbage.

There’s a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment that goes: ah, but the feed, the flow, the dance between plat­forms … that’s pre­cisely the new medium! Impro­vi­sa­tion and evo­lu­tion, sen­si­tive response to audi­ence and algorithm, nimble wavefront: that IS the work. Net­work per­for­mance!

This argu­ment seems compelling, in part because it plays the familiar, pow­erful trick of whis­pering “you’re just old”, but it cannot be correct, not in the long run, because of what we know for sure about technology, and time.

Time has the last laugh, as your net­work per­for­mance is washed away by the same flood that pro­duced it.

Fin­ished work remains, stubbornly, because it has edges to defend itself, and a solid, gras­pable premise with which to recruit its cult.

And lo! The Green Knight wins the day.

Links and recommendations

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, foun­da­tion stone of puzzle fic­tion, favorite of twelve-year-olds for decades, is avail­able for the first time in Dutch, in a new trans­la­tion from the pub­lisher Nieuwezijds.

This was one of the most for­ma­tive reads of my life; as a writer, I am still, in some sense, trying to match the energy on these pages. Therefore, I’m VERY happy to report that I played a tiny part in the pro­duc­tion of this new Het Spel van Westing! Its instigator, Ionica Smeets, learned about the book from my tap essay Fish. That intro­duc­tion led to Dirk-Jan Arensman’s trans­la­tion, and to Iris van der Veen’s per­fect cover, pic­tured above.

Recall, this book was first pub­lished in 1978.

The cult is patient. The cult is growing.

My whole sto­ry­line, “books win in the end!”, risks being too cute: just a feel-good consolation. I acknowl­edge that risk, and I con­sider it often. Yet the sto­ry­line turns out, sorry, to be fac­tu­ally correct. Books win in the end!

Here is a hol­iday movie rec, i.e., an invi­ta­tion to join a very small cult:

A few months ago, I was browsing my Apple movie library when I spotted Master & Com­mander, directed by Peter Weir, which I’m sure I haven’t watched since its release, twenty years ago. I started it up and found myself totally captivated. What a great movie: and yes, it is really a MOVIE, with whole­ness and intention, pal­pable craft, Rus­sell Crowe. If you have fond mem­o­ries of this one, or if you never saw it, it’s worth a hol­iday viewing.

Master & Com­mander pushes the same but­tons as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, somehow. It was pro­duced in the same era, and seems to have held up in some of the same ways.

Here is a lec­ture from Ter­ence Tao, the path­breaking mathematician, though it’s not about math, or at least not his kind. Instead, it is a nerdy, pre­cise tour of the cosmic dis­tance ladder: the inter­gen­er­a­tional project to assemble a set of mea­sures and equiv­a­lences by which we can judge things as absolutely wild as the dis­tances to other galaxies.

I like the insight, early on, that eclipses are par­tic­ularly useful in this context. There’s some­thing deep there: the sense that when two things align, you learn a lot about both. Occlu­sion has a kind of infor­ma­tional density.

The lec­ture is absolutely thrilling. Highly rec­om­mended.

More Ter­ence Tao! Here’s some fun speculation about how humans might adapt dif­ferent parts of the brain for math (emphasis mine):

My theory here is that evo­lu­tion has not directly pro­vided humans with a spe­cial­ized por­tion of the mind to do mathematics. Instead, as each human is exposed to the sub­ject, they learn to repur­pose other por­tions of the brain to help them grapple with this abstract sub­ject. For some, this may be the visual pro­cessing cen­ters; for others, lan­guage cen­ters; or cen­ters opti­mized for competition, sen­sory experience, etc., etc. Certainly, on talking with other mathematicians, I see a great diver­sity in how they con­cep­tu­alize the sub­ject, and it is a par­tic­ular plea­sure to col­lab­o­rate with a math­e­mati­ican with a dis­tinctly dif­ferent cog­ni­tive frame­work for the field, as we often both learn enor­mously from the experience.

Here are your direc­tives from M. John Harrison, as provoca­tive and pro­duc­tive as always. A sample:

Never use the word “trope”, even pejoratively. In anti-formalist fic­tion there is no such thing as a trope & every­thing hap­pens as if it has never hap­pened before.

Every­thing hap­pens as if it has never hap­pened before!

Here is a view of a scrappy new “school” for dig­ital designers. I like the spirit of the endeavor, but/and I like this writeup by Carly Ayres even more. Her curious, humane voice shines through.

I rec­om­mend Carly’s design-focused newsletter—she is clearly Up To Some­thing Lately, and it’s fun to follow along.

Here is a bundle of book news from Ken Liu, who is one of the really good ones.

Of his diary written between 1939 and 1945, still in print, Friedrich Kellner wrote:

I could not fight the Nazis in the present, as they had the power to still my voice, so I decided to fight them in the future. I would give the coming gen­er­a­tions a weapon against any resur­gence of such evil.

Here is a beau­tiful photo project from Mary Welcome: God Bless the USPS.

Here’s an update from my fave, Grid Status, on the great suc­cess of bat­tery storage in California.

Here’s a detailed report from Cloud­flare on the recent sub­ma­rine internet cable cuts in the North Sea.

As with the Grid Status post above, I find myself totally drawn to this kind of documentation, sort of journalism-adjacent, that answers the question, “wot just hap­pened in the net­work?”

Here is Mk.gee on Sat­urday Night Live, a revelation. The sound is both new and nostalgic; the sense, somehow, of glacial ice cracking; what a relief.

I will not relent until I have incepted in you this notion of “the short 2020s”, because I believe it is both (1) fun and (2) correct. Con­sider it cousin to Eric Hobsbawm’s “short 20th century”, which began in 1914 and ended in 1991. The short 2020s began in 2022 and will end in (I predict) 2027.

In the meantime: maybe Mk.gee is the sound of this brief, chaotic decade.

Here is Alexis Madrigal, about whom you’ll hear a lot more in 2025, on the over­looked lesson of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

Tell you what: if any book has a cult, it’s this one. The cult comes spring-loaded inside! Octavia! You mad genius!

Alexis’s argu­ment, his insight, is very close to my heart. Parable of the Sower is THE Great Amer­ican Novel, I insist, because it matches its brutal dark­ness to a sort of insane hope, a sci-fi vision so huge it makes Star Trek look tame.

What’s more Amer­ican than that?

I’ll end this year where Alexis ends, with one of the tenets of Earthseed:

There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.

From Oakland, on Earth, a living world,

Robin

P.S. I hope to see you on New Year’s Day for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!

December 2024