The golden door

I’ve lived in Cal­i­fornia for twenty years now!

It feels like a good occa­sion to recount my Cal­i­fornia origin story, which I’ve told many times in person, but never written down. You’ll find that below.

What a sky this week: a full moon, with Saturn very close. A par­tial lunar eclipse last night! I’m back on schedule with these newsletters.

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

Here’s what’s ahead in this edition:

• An August of ideas: my Cal­i­fornia origin story

• The slow lift: a dis­covery

• Links and rec­om­mendations: not toooo many

• Checking in: what’s Robin doing?

An August of ideas

Here’s the story.

It was the summer of 2004. For two years, I’d worked at the Poynter Institute, a sto­ried haven for jour­nal­ists in St. Petersburg, Florida; my first job out of college. It had been a trans­for­ma­tive time. Every week, a new cohort of reporters arrived, and when­ever I wasn’t editing arti­cles or writing code (ActionScript!) I sat in on their sessions, sponge-like. With my col­league Matt Thompson, I started a blog; together, we pro­duced the short film EPIC 2014.

2014, because that sounded like the dizzy future.

But it was 2004, actu­ally, and I was ready to move on. Here’s what I knew that summer:

• My work in Florida would soon conclude, after which

• I would pack all my pos­ses­sions into my Toyota and drive to Cal­i­fornia, where

• a long­time friend had just arrived in Sacramento. (In the years since, that friend has fol­lowed an aston­ishing path; he is now the lead audio programmer at Epic Games, makers of Unreal Engine and Fortnite!)

Why Cal­i­fornia? Well, because I had a friend there … 

 … and because of the rumor.

It went like this: Al Gore was starting a cable news net­work. This net­work would use the internet in a rad­ical new way; it would be par­tic­i­pa­tory, somehow. Its code­name was INdTV.

It really was just a rumor. There was no web­site. There cer­tainly weren’t any job postings. The ven­ture was men­tioned in per­haps four news clip­pings total; I read them over and over, gnawed on every stringy detail. The net­work would be based not in New York or Los Angeles, the rumors said, but San Fran­cisco.

The rumors said Al Gore had a partner in this ven­ture. I sleuthed Joel Hyatt’s email address.

The boundary between ini­tia­tive and mania is fuzzy, and the plan I hatched that summer tres­passed freely. I was 24, obsessed with jour­nalism and the internet, their poten­tial together. It was a dif­ferent era, remember; hardly any­thing had been attempted.

On August 1, 2004, I sent a cold email to the address I’d found for Joel. My intro­duc­tion went some­thing like this: I think you’re working on the most inter­esting thing in the world, and I believe I have some skills and intu­itions that could be helpful. To prove it, I’m going to send you an idea every day in the month of August. Here’s the first one.

To his eternal credit, Joel replied immediately. His mes­sage was terse but not unfriendly. He said, basically: Let’s see what you’ve got.

I drove from Florida up to Michigan, from Michigan out to Cal­i­fornia. I had a bundle of ideas banked, but by day ten, I was grasping. I would drive along I-80, nothing but corn for miles, and I’d think about the future. Wi-Fi was harder to find in those days; some­times I’d batch a few ideas into one email, knowing I was headed into empty country.

A sample batch:

Every few days, I’d receive a reply. Nothing too effusive. Interesting, Joel might remark. A mys­te­rious name might be cc’d.

I still remember the last part of the drive, through Nevada. I’d worn out my handful of CDs. I’d thought all the thoughts I was going to think. The radio was a blank hiss. So I drove in silence, and for a few hours, my mind was truly empty.

Then came the ver­tical shock of the Sierra Nevada, and the nearly alien land­scape beyond. I had no visions of Cal­i­fornia, no expec­ta­tions at all. I wasn’t coming for Cal­i­fornia, but for this ven­ture (which, to be clear, I had not been invited to join) and if it had been in Chicago or Seattle, I’d have turned the car around.

I arrived in Sacramento. My final email to Joel said this, of course:

He invited me into the city; incredible. I crossed the Bay Bridge, and my first stop in San Fran­cisco was a Kinko’s in the Finan­cial District, where I picked up sev­eral bound copies of my August fusillade.

At lunch, there were three of us: me, Joel, and Joanna Drake, who would become my man­ager and mentor — the best boss I ever had. It says a lot about those two, and the whole spirit of their ven­ture, that they never once asked me where I went to college.

It helped, I think, that I had EPIC 2014 to show them: evi­dence of a larger theory of media. Evi­dence I knew how to tell a story.

Anyway, I became the sev­enth employee at INdTV, soon to be revealed as Cur­rent TV. For three months, I drove into the city from Sacramento — I don’t rec­om­mend it — and then I rented a room on Lin­coln Way, across the street from Golden Gate Park.

Cur­rent TV went live on cable sys­tems across the U.S. on August 1, 2005. I worked at the com­pany for five years, which doesn’t sound that long as I’m writing this, but those years were rich, packed with inci­dent and invention — and not only inside that office. Recall that Twitter launched in March 2006, YouTube in December 2005. Recall that the founders of Face­book moved to Cal­i­fornia the same summer I did! (That this remains the essen­tial dramatis per­sonae of dig­ital media tells you a lot about the times. The 2000s were all about invention; the 2010s, consolidation.)

In the long run, Cur­rent TV’s suc­cess was its diaspora. I wasn’t the only person attracted, moth-like, to the incan­des­cence of its par­tic­i­pa­tory premise. Over time, those people fanned out across media and tech. Many were pulled into YouTube’s orbit; just as many founded com­pa­nies of their own. Today, Cur­rent TV alumni are everywhere, and they are, very often, the most inter­esting people in the room.

For my part, I’ll remain grateful for­ever to Joel Hyatt and Joanna Drake for an unlikely oppor­tu­nity that opened into so many more. When I crossed the Bay Bridge that first time, bound for my lunch meeting, I didn’t know I was entering a city I would write novels about.

A word on Al Gore.

He wasn’t around the Cur­rent TV office too often, but he was around when it counted, and he was always curious and kind. Graceful. He told a story about the kernel of the net­work’s concept, which was a story about human evolution, the way visual media hacks our brains, and the urgent need, therefore, to make visual media that is actu­ally good. He told that story over and over. I could never get enough.

The fork in the road is too far gone now, the cas­cading changes too many to imagine, but even so, the what-if sce­nario of a Pres­i­dent Al Gore at the dawn of the 21st cen­tury pro­duces pow­erful melan­choly. I saw him up close, just briefly, many years ago, and allow me to confirm: here is a great mind, and a great American.

The slow lift

For the past year, I’ve been doing a kind of strength training I never knew existed. Kathryn recruited me, after doing it for a year herself. For both of us, this rou­tine has been trans­for­ma­tive, so I thought I might men­tion it here.

Here’s how it goes:

You lift weights, using big machines that iso­late par­tic­ular mus­cles. You work at your max­imum capacity — from the very first moment, you are thinking, uh oh, this is VERY heavy. You do this with a trainer; that’s crucial, because you simply would not suffer so much without supervision.

Your “reps” blend into one con­tin­uous motion, tran­si­tioning smoothly from pushing to pulling, pulling to pushing. There’s no jerking or heaving, no clanging or banging. You go slow.

But that “slow” is, in a way, fast. After 60-90 seconds, the muscle is spent: you can’t push (or pull) any more. I had never worked my mus­cles to failure before, so for me this was an odd feeling: the mes­sage being dis­patched from my brain, push!, and nothing happening. It’s not unpleasant … just odd. A bit floaty.

The work is bru­tally difficult, but it’s over quickly. The whole cir­cuit takes thirty minutes, and you do it: once a week.

Once a week!

At my gym they say, you’re not here to do reps. You’re not even here to lift weights. You are here to exhaust your mus­cles, as effi­ciently as possible, so your body under­stands very clearly that it’s time to get stronger.

Over the past year, I have gotten so much stronger!

I’m a child of the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s amazing to rec­og­nize that the con­sensus of that era was, essen­tially, backward. What was the epitome of health, as I learned it? A low-fat diet, with lots of aerobics.

Here I am, making olive oil, lifting heavy weights.

The results have been steady and satisfying. My body feels dif­ferent these days. (Of course, my appre­ci­a­tion is twinned with the melan­choly of I wish I’d dis­cov­ered this ten years ago.)

So that’s my report. It’s true, of course, that just about any kind of strength training is great, espe­cially if it takes you all the way to muscle failure. I thought I’d men­tion this par­tic­ular flavor only because it was entirely new to me, and so dif­ferent from every image of “weight lifting” I’ve ever seen or imagined.

I’ve gone to the gym before. I’ve whirled kettle bells. What has been trans­for­ma­tive, this past year, is the inten­sity of the slow lift. I don’t claim to under­stand all the meta­bolic par­tic­ulars, but I do claim to feel them.

(You have a body, Robin. Life cannot be all words and symbols. It’s some­thing I am always learning, always for­get­ting again … )

I go to Live Oak Strength in Emeryville, and if you live in my part of the East Bay, I rec­om­mend it unreservedly. There are com­pa­rable gyms around the country — the key­word seems to be “high inten­sity”.

Another golden door.

Links and recommendations

Here is a beau­tiful con­sid­er­a­tion of Moon­bound by Chris­tian P. Haines in one of the great sci­ence fic­tion magazines.

Okay, this will sur­prise no one, but I loved Rebecca Boyle’s book about the moon:

In these pages, Rebecca approaches her sub­ject from lit­er­ally every angle — mythological, ecological, astrophysical … it’s kalei­do­scopic and relevatory.

And she intro­duced me to this artifact:

It’s a disc of bronze with a beau­tiful blue-green patina, inlaid with gold, almost four thou­sand years old. Called the the “Nebra sky disc” for the place where it was dis­cov­ered, its use isn’t fully understood, but clearly, this is a map of the sky. Those seven dots clus­tered together can only be Pleiades.

When I flipped to the book’s glossy insert to dis­cover this picture, the Nebra sky disc leapt instantly into my per­sonal top ten — of what? Of every­thing, I think. Certainly, of all images crafted by humans, anytime, anywhere.

Volume con­tinues to impress. Though each book starts with a funding progress bar, this isn’t Kickstarter, because it’s totally curated, the work all con­sis­tently high-end. I sup­pose it’s a throwback, then, to the ear­liest days of publishing, when a crit­ical mass of readers would “subscribe” to a book ahead of time, ensuring its publication.

Previously, Volume has pub­lished the noir-ish pho­tog­raphy of Liam Wong and a beau­tiful com­pendium from the Public Domain Review, as well as The Finishers, an odd and intense vision of the Barkley ultramarathon. (I don’t like marathons of any kind, yet I was still totally cap­ti­vated by this book.)

The cur­rent progress bar is attached to a his­tory of video game speedrunning. Follow that link and you’ll find glimpses of a design that looks absolutely gonzo. Strong WIRED-in-the-1990s energy.

What an anecdote:

This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gin­grich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all gov­ern­ment con­tracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that data­base engine now.”

That data­base engine is now built into every single iPhone, and much else. Here is SQLite’s creator, Richard Hipp, with all the fas­ci­nating details.

Here is Victor Hugo, What the poet said to him­self in 1848, as cir­cu­lated by Adam Roberts.

Here is a gallery of beau­tiful places for books!

Here is the blue cube. “When near the blue cube, one stops at the blue cube.”

Here is a discussion, by the physicist-philosopher David Albert, of the ways in which the deep puzzle of quantum mechanics cuts to the heart of the sci­en­tific project. That link goes to the interview’s conclusion, but the entire thing is worthwhile; he’s a super engaging speaker.

After watching this interview, I picked up his book and really enjoyed it.

Here is Taste Notes, the recur­ring roundup of cool stuff from the newsletter One Thing, which is quickly becoming a sort of mini-Monocle of my dreams. Sharp, cosmopolitan, super fun.

If you haven’t ever read Ray Bradbury’s tale of Mr. Electrico, and his origin as a writer — maybe as a person — then go rec­tify the sit­u­a­tion immediately. I don’t even want to quote any­thing; it’s a thrilling, iconic sequence of memory. Another golden door.

Here is the truest post, oof.

Here is Christo­pher Brown on a story too good to check:

This week I stum­bled upon the story of how, while exploring the Orinoco River in Venezuela in 1800, Alexander von Hum­boldt met a parrot who was the only living speaker of the lan­guage of an Indige­nous people whose pop­u­la­tion had oth­er­wise been extinguished. Whether it really was a dead lan­guage seems to be a matter of debate. But true or not, the story tells a truth we can all intuit.

Note that Chris’s new book A Nat­ural His­tory of Empty Lots, which I have praised previously, is now avail­able to pur­chase and read!

Here is Flo­ren­tyna Leow’s report from the first Oni­giri Summit of Japan.

The first! Oni­giri Summit! Of Japan!!

I loved Flo­ren­tyna’s book How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, avail­able from the Emma Press, an absolute dream of an inde­pen­dent publisher.

Here’s Jim Rion on translating Uketsu, coming soon from Pushkin. Very weird, very cool, and very pos­sibly the next big thing. (I loved Jim’s trans­la­tion of The Devil’s Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, also pub­lished by Pushkin.)

Here is the Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive on the his­tory of lim­ited animation, which is to say, every­thing that wasn’t, and isn’t, the lush motion of early Disney films.

Rather than block or obstruct, lim­i­ta­tion seems always to become a portal through which one might squeeze to dis­cover … what? Whole new aes­thetic countries!

Sorry, but I still love this: Run­ning Up That Hill, performed in Old English!

Checking in

It’s useful, maybe, to return every so often to the simple question:

What’s Robin doing?

As many of you know, in addi­tion to writing novels, I help operate a small olive oil com­pany. The olive har­vest runs through October and November; it’s an intense season, as man­dated by nature. For a com­pany like ours that does both pro­duc­tion and distribution, the har­vest segues delightfully — relentlessly — into the hol­iday scrum. So, where writing is concerned, it’s really “pencils down” until Christmas.

Back when I had office jobs, I never dreamed that sea­sons could matter this much. Now, it is Earth, THE FREAKING BIOSPHERE, set­ting my schedule, and I’m happy to obey. For me, the har­vest brings a change of scenery; a change of pace; a change of clothes. It’s very hard work, yet it’s also refreshing.

And it starts soon.

Okay, but more broadly, what’s Robin doing?

My writing project con­tinues, of course. What is that project? The pro­duc­tion of books that mix the genres and styles I love most, while adding some­thing new — pushing those genres and styles forward — in a way that attracts a large, enthu­si­astic read­er­ship around the world. These books always encourage their readers to con­tem­plate scale, in one way or another. These books make scale undeniable. That’s it! That’s the project.

Between those two pillars, the com­pany and the books, there is the fun of daily life (substantial) and the fizz of other fas­ci­na­tions (held barely in check) (as evi­denced by these newsletters). Put all those things together and … that’s what Robin is doing!

It’s almost TOO Cal­i­fornia, I realize. Novels and olives; the fer­ment of the San Fran­cisco Bay Area and the fecun­dity of the San Joaquin Valley. I didn’t see any of this coming in the summer of 2004, dri­ving across the country. I had no visions of this place. Without real­izing it, I passed through the golden door.

From Cal­i­fornia, twenty years later,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in late October.

September 2024