Good trains

Just back from Japan, my fifth sub­stan­tial trip in ten years. At this point, we have iden­ti­fied Our Favorite Places, and we simply return to them. This kind of travel always seemed the­o­ret­ical to me, some­thing people only do in novels … yet now there’s a fancy ryokan where they remember us, and a homey bar in the same town where the owner shrieks: “You’re back!!”

It was my favorite Japan trip since my first. We went with friends and dis­cov­ered that we travel well together, which I think really just means we are all capable of enjoying things to the same degree.

An under­rated capability, that one.

Everywhere, there was such care, on scales ranging from the radius of a cock­tail bar to the sprawl of the shinkansen. More than once, the self-admonishment arose: “Robin, you need to pay atten­tion to this. It’s remarkable, and it might not last forever. Pay atten­tion!”

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 March 2026. 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:

• Japan thoughts: trains, books, more trains

• Links and recommendations: com­puter sto­ries, street lettering, dun­geon synth

Japan thoughts

The trains

I spend a lot of time in the San Joaquin Valley of Cal­i­fornia, where this country’s first high-speed rail line is coming together, very slowly. Huge ele­ments of the route have been con­structed but not yet con­nected. These gleaming new bridges and plat­forms are legit­i­mately beautiful; they loom in the land­scape like ruins in reverse. I’m a fan of the project, even though it’s plainly a tragedy — Abundance tells the com­pre­hen­sive story. Actual track goes down later this year, and all along the route, dirt is being pounded into place, flat and smooth.

Japan’s first high-speed lines opened in the 1960s, and its archi­tects have had all the years since to press on: learning, extending, refining. Shinkansen means “new trunk line”; it’s not so new anymore, yet riding those trains remains legit­i­mately futuristic, def­i­nitely superfun. And it feels truly shameful for the U.S. to be so many decades behind.

It’s useful to note that in its ini­tial development, the shinkansen went way over budget — more than 2X. Yet there was never any ques­tion that it would be completed. Think of Keynes: “Anything we can actu­ally do, we can afford.”

I don’t intend any false equiv­a­lence here; even granted major hand­i­caps for U.S. dysfunction, the Cal­i­fornia line is a disaster. Yet there’s a hard, grinding hope in the example of the shinkansen, which says: just finish it, so you can really begin.

The books

My Japanophilia is strongest in fic­tion. Here are some favorites:

• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, trans­lated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is strange and hyp­notic — I can’t think of a recent U.S. novel that’s simul­ta­ne­ously as uncon­ven­tional and captivating. It’s also fun to read as coun­ter­point to the cult of the kon­bini that has arisen among visitors. (This includes me: I bow down before the Japanese 7-11.)

• What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, trans­lated by Alison Watts, is sweet but/and also subtly radical. I reviewed it for the NYT, and here I’ll just repeat, this book is an emblem for some qui­etly pow­erful fea­tures of Japanese society. I’d also like to claim it for the Extended Penumbraverse; there’s no ques­tion the strange and pow­erful Mrs. Komachi has met Ajax Penumbra.

• I’ve written before about Tokyo These Days, the manga series by Taiyo Matsumoto, trans­lated by Michael Arias — his pro­found love letter to all his editors. The story and char­ac­ters are won­derful, but/and so is the ren­dering of the Japanese land­scape, Tokyo and beyond.

• All of Banana Yoshi­moto’s books are sweet and stylish, a plea­sure to read: tales of life in the city. Oh and they are short! WE LOVE A SHORT BOOK. You can choose basi­cally at random, but Kitchen, trans­lated by Megan Backus, remains her most famous work.

That’s all Japanese work trans­lated into English. Here are some books orig­i­nally written in English:

• Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry is prob­ably a top-ten work of 21st-century nonfic­tion. It’s pro­foundly haunting, and I’m so impressed by Richard’s refusal to like, “collapse the wave function” of pos­si­bility around the expe­ri­ences and encoun­ters reported by sur­vivors of the 2011 earth­quake and tsunami. Here is reporting, in the true sense: here’s what I saw, what I heard, what people told me.

• On another wave­length entirely, but like­wise captivating, Richard’s People Who Eat Darkness is a hyp­notic account of a grue­some crime, offering a view of sev­eral layers of Japanese society that tourists don’t see or think about.

• How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Flo­ren­tyna Leow is a slim, pre­cise memoir of living and working in Japan as a non-Japanese person — though one who speaks fluent Japanese. It’s also simply about young life anywhere: room­mates and jobs, hopes and disappointments. You could read Flo­ren­tyna along­side Banana Yoshi­moto and imagine char­ac­ters from both books meeting on a sidewalk.

• Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod weaves a per­cep­tive view of Japan’s back­roads together with a quin­tes­sen­tially Amer­ican back­story to pro­duce an effect that is totally new. One def­i­n­i­tion of literature, or any art maybe, is that it defines a fresh genre of which it is the only example; I believe this describes TBOT. (On Craig’s book tour last year, I was his inter­locutor in San Fran­cisco, and you can listen to and/or read our con­ver­sa­tion here.)

• Embracing Defeat by John Dower is deep and thrilling. Even a reader well-acquainted with the 20th-century his­tory of Japan and the U.S. will dis­cover in this book whole new panoramas of the postwar period: rich crunchy dynamics, cul­ture rewiring itself in realtime, and not with a sense of erasure, but rather hyper­gen­er­a­tive reconstruction. This book chal­lenges dull assump­tions about “victory” and “defeat”, what they mean on the most basic level; and about “success”, too — of a country, a society, a cul­ture. (The chapter on postwar publishing, the explo­sion of pulp magazines, was of course par­tic­u­larly inter­esting to me.)

I love Japanese mys­teries for their wacky, frigid construction — as if these authors looked at the cold clock­work of the Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries and said, “Oh, that’s WAY too loose and squishy.”

I’ve written before about The Decagon House Murders, and more recently I have enjoyed nearly every book in this series from Pushkin Vertigo. (What a name for an imprint — sounds like a char­acter from a novel.)

I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed The Honjin Murders and The Devil’s Flute Murders. The latter was trans­lated by Jim Rion, who also trans­lated Strange Pictures, which has turned into a global bestseller. I haven’t read it yet, but Robin Rendle says it’s great!

Jim has written about the process of trans­lating a very strange book.

One more: Point Zero by Seicho Matsumoto, trans­lated by Louise Heal Kawai, is like a Hitch­cock movie crossed with one of those story problems: “Train A leaves Tokyo trav­eling 200 m.p.h. … ”

More trains

The best trains in Japan are the JR Kyushu trains, and those are the best thanks to designer Eiji Mitooka. You can browse a gallery here, or take a look at the col­lec­tion on Eiji Mitooka’s Wikipedia page.

Here’s the luxe Seven Stars:

The Yufuin no Mori:

And the 36+3! I have been a pas­senger on this one. Every day, you receive a bento lunch assem­bled from ingre­di­ents pro­duced in towns the train is passing through:

It’s not just the cutesy trains that are great. Many dif­ferent models of shinkansen roam the tracks in Japan, and, to my eye, JR Kyushu’s look the best:

And it doesn’t stop at trains! Until recently, JR Kyushu oper­ated a super­fast ferry from Fukuoka to South Korea, also designed by Eiji Mitooka. Behold THE QUEEN BEETLE:

(Sadly … it leaked.)

Links and recommendations

Mr. President, please, I need a faster train … 

The latest edi­tion of my pop-up newsletter is about the limits of AI automation.

In this short argument, I draw on lessons from sewing and olive harvesting, and invest all my hopes for a non-robotic future in the great and pow­erful PAPER JAM.

Here is David Oks on why the ATM did not (as predicted) kill bank teller jobs … but the iPhone did. What a great post — per­fect use of data and details to deflate a story that “seems right”.

David writes:

But by talking about why ATMs didn’t dis­place bank tellers but iPhones did, I want to high­light an impor­tant corollary, which is that the true force of a tech­nology is felt not with the sub­sti­tu­tion of tasks, but the inven­tion of new paradigms.

Here’s another post that like­wise “takes the ques­tion seriously”, and in this case, the ques­tion is an all-timer: why is the sky blue?

In my notes, I wrote:

An ideal flavor of explanation. Serious and open. “Let’s figure this out together.”

I loved this rol­licking event at the Com­puter His­tory Museum on the occa­sion of Apple’s 50th anniversary, 1976-2026. Chris Espinosa’s recol­lec­tion of a par­tic­ular ser­vice pro­ce­dure for the Apple III made my day. There’s no escaping phys­ical reality!

The CHM is a treasure; if you live in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area you MUST at some point make your pilgrimage, just to gaze at the glo­rious hulks. Last summer, I wrote a quick dis­patch from the Vin­tage Com­puter Festival, which is maybe a bit over­whelming for your first expe­ri­ence, but always totally spectacular.

Here is a lovely memoir of a youthful career at Babbage’s, which fellow old­timers will remember as the pre­em­i­nent soft­ware store. Yes: we used to GO TO A STORE to pur­chase com­puter programs!

The rise and fall of Babbage’s “rhymes” com­pletely with the dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion of other media, and in all these cases, at least two things are true:

1. The new arrangement produces breathtaking new forms of access: it has become trivial for basically anybody to participate in these markets.

And yet, somehow,

2. the old arrangement was tons more fun!

Read Lee Hutchinson’s recol­lec­tion and tell me you disagree.

I am waiting patiently for the launch of the Slate truck at the end of this year. I’ve been leasing a Volk­swagen ID.4 since the summer, and the actual dri­ving expe­ri­ence is won­derful — I just want to rip the screen off the dash­board and throw it out the window.

Come on, Slate! Give us the screen-free EV of our dreams!

Bonus: Slate’s head­quar­ters is in the town where I grew up 😌

Bonus bonus: Slate’s first fac­tory is an old printing plant 😌😌

Here is the new type­face from Mass-Driver. Robin Rendle notes the confidence of this release, and I agree with him: it’s bracing and charismatic. Also beautiful, of course.

Mass-Driver’s Lórien has become my house font for print productions, and you’ll be seeing more of it later this year.

My copy of Pooja Saxena’s India Street Lettering arrived!

It’s fab­u­lous — every spread glows:

Come on!

Pooja’s incandescent compendium is a required pur­chase for anyone inter­esting in typography, graphic design, and/or urban space. It exists thanks to Blaft, the pub­lisher respon­sible for one of my all-time favorites, Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India.

Here is a recent edi­tion of The Ani­ma­tion Obsessive that is, slantwise, a man­i­festo about effort, skill, and the power of just making some­thing with whatever’s before you: per­haps just sand and a source of light. Great stuff.

Here’s the sta­tionery from the Streamliner, a luxe train route that oper­ated between Chicago and San Fran­cisco circa 1936-1972:

“Enroute”!!

That’s from Stationery Object, a swoon­worthy project by Robert Stephens.

Oof … JetPens with a direct hit to the aes­thetic core, this video pro­file of a Japanese note­book maker … meltdown in 5, 4, 3 … 

Here’s the back­story of a cer­tain shade of seafoam green you have seen if you’ve spent any time in indus­trial spaces. I loved this post from Beth Mathews — it’s beau­ti­fully presented, packed with pictures. I found my way here thanks to Drew Austin at Kneeling Bus.

Here’s a good post by Drew, a few years old but new to me, arguing that tech’s indif­fer­ence to fashion is a con­tempt for the commons. That’s via Spencer Chang.

Spencer, by the way, is on a roll, with recent reports on a sub­stan­tial visit to China: part 1, part 2. That second dis­patch focuses on the dig­ital side of the expe­ri­ence:

It all started to make sense when I dis­cov­ered that web­sites in China are built on a com­pletely dif­ferent, insular sub­strate of infrastructure. Mini-apps are made of custom forks of HTML, pro­pri­etary ones for each major company, each with their own rules and syntax.3 From the out­side (and as a foreigner), you can’t even access most of the apps because they are gated behind login screens that require Chi­nese phone numbers.

Living in China means living in an alter­nate Internet.

A weird hybrid between tra­di­tional mobile apps and web­sites, these apps feel uni­form and imper­sonal, while stream­lining all the core parts of an everyday app. They load fast, even on old hardware, con­nect auto­mat­i­cally to your identity, and inte­grate directly with your wallet for payments.

You might have read ver­sions of “the China report” before, but it’s gen­uinely dif­ferent and useful to encounter this expe­ri­ence fil­tered through Spencer’s gaze, his ana­lyt­ical frame: humane and tactile, rather than com­mer­cial and abstract.

Spencer is one of the great inte­gra­tors of the dig­ital and phys­ical; his newsletter is absolutely worth following, a guide toward an alter­nate internet of its own.

Looking at train-adjacent art for this edi­tion, I dis­cov­ered this 1909 photo of John Jacob Astor, and found myself really cap­ti­vated by his expression:

Maybe a stretch, but I detect a trace of angel-of-his­tory energy there … 

BEHOLD, GALVATRON! A few weeks ago I came across this clip from The Transformers: The Movie, and remem­bered (or realized) that this scene in par­tic­ular is a top-five for­ma­tive aes­thetic input of my life.

I’m a fan of the music sub­genre called dun­geon synth, which tends to sound like the sound­track to a video game you can only dimly remember. Hole Dweller is great as a starting point. Pos­sibly my #1 favorite is this album by Rhandir and Disparition, which was in heavy rota­tion while I wrote Moonbound. That playlist was 25% dun­geon synth, 25% Håkon Kornstad, and 50% every ver­sion of Seven Nation Army ever recorded.

A think tank posted a link to this chart … 

 … calling it “a slow, steady, easy-to-miss kind of progress.”

Yet … you’d have to know a lot more to make that judgment, wouldn’t you? For example, one might ask, is the food on the right side of the graph as nutri­tious as the food on the left side? What’s the com­po­si­tion of the average meal on either side? And what about the wages of the people pro­ducing and pack­aging the food?

An exercise: plot the trend in health­care costs on the same graph.

My instinct tells me that about half of the change is indeed positive, attrib­ut­able to plain old productivity, while the other half is malign, and we’d be better off as a society if that trend­line tracked a little higher.

Food is life’s foundation; it powers our mus­cles and our minds; who said it ought to be cheap?

Here is an actu­ally-hilarious offering from SNL: an inter­view with the most- and least-used emojis.

Here is Dirt Books! Any­time any­body dares (or bothers) to launch a weird new imprint in the 21st century, we cheer!

P.S. I liked this recent Dirt piece: The feeling of the old world fading away

Here is an inter­view with Astrid Eich­horn, a physi­cist working on “asymptotic safety”, which might be sum­ma­rized as “the only way out is through”:

The apparent break­down of par­ticle physics at [the Planck] scale has inspired some dra­matic theories. Some physi­cists argue that this failure point in our under­standing tells us that the uni­verse is fun­da­men­tally com­posed not of par­ticles, but of vibrating strings and membranes. [ … ]

Eich­horn and her col­leagues are pur­suing a dif­ferent pos­si­bility. In 1976, Steven Weinberg, a the­o­rist who would even­tu­ally earn a Nobel Prize, pointed out that if you zoomed in far enough, you might reach a place where the rules of physics would stop changing. New realms would stop appearing; the inten­si­ties of the forces would stabilize; and gravity would turn out to make per­fect sense after all.

Here is a fab­u­lous matchup: Dwarkesh Patel inter­views Ada Palmer. Dwarkesh is best-known for his inter­views of AI luminaries, but/and his side quests into his­tory are reli­ably magnetic. Ada is a cel­e­brated author of sci­ence fic­tion who is also a his­to­rian of the Renaissance.

The seg­ment discussing Guten­berg and the very early days of the printing press is par­tic­u­larly compelling. I have read a lot — really a lot! —  about this period, yet I found new fram­ings here; I love Ada’s focus on dis­tri­b­u­tion networks. This is just extremely fun and inter­esting all around.

One of the pri­vate con­trac­tors building Cal­i­fornia’s high-speed rail line graces us with the most William Gibson-ass name you’ve ever heard: Dragados Flatiron 😎

Here’s a reminder, from Alan Jacobs, of the power of a phrase and an image from Robert Mac­far­lane:

A decade ago Robert Mac­far­lane pub­lished a won­derful book called Land­marks [ … ] which argues for the preser­va­tion and exten­sion of the accu­rate descrip­tion of our nat­ural environments. The book col­lects, from a range of British places, local words for local things, and Mac­far­lane calls that col­lec­tion his Counter-Desecration Phrasebook. It occurs to me that we need many Counter-Desecration Phrase­books to help us pro­tect and pre­serve what Gan­dalf calls “all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands.”

Mac­far­lane’s focus is on the pre­ci­sion of local language, yet in Alan’s endorse­ment I detect the pos­si­bility of broader application. For my part, I think any and every little per­sonal newsletter or blog, if it’s con­structed with sin­cerity and care, acts as a tiny CDP. Or per­haps it pro­vides one page in the larger CDP: still meager com­pared to all the books of ruin on all the shelves of the world … and so what?

CAR­LOAD OF POTATO!

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in mid-April, con­taining the announce­ment of a new project and a new product.

March 2026