The great
resounding doink

Back in mid-November, I cir­cu­lated my 2023 gift guide.

• If you missed it: give it a look.
• If you didn’t miss it: give it another look!

You’ll find a couple of late-breaking additions, items newly available: a cool synthesizer and a lovely book.

I appre­ciate this sen­ti­ment from Charlie Warzel:

Gift giving is such a skill … but so is thought­fully curating things that might make great gifts. It feels like such a nice insight into a person.

I hadn’t ever thought about the gift guide as a light sort of lit­erary genre until this moment; but certainly, it is, or it can be. A mate­rial memoir. Cool.

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 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

Is it over­dra­matic to say that a season of oper­ating heavy machinery has just changed my life? Possibly. The fact remains, I have that feeling — you know the one — of a por­ten­tous expe­ri­ence working its way through my system, still only halfway metabolized. Across October and November, my days in the mill yielded the fol­lowing dis­coveries:

• It is always pos­sible to learn new things, some­times very quickly. Whole crafts and com­pe­ten­cies are out there, just waiting for you. It helps when you have no choice but to learn them: NOW.

• Tools make a difference. A pro­duc­tive machine is capital, in the deep sense: leverage. Don’t be afraid to invest in a serious tool when the time is right.

• If it requires three-phase power … all the better!!

• My body appears to be much hap­pier when I spend my days standing and circling, rather than sit­ting and typing. Hmm.

Long­time sub­scribers know that on New Year’s Day, I broad­cast a live reading of the Middle Eng­lish poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I took last year off; this year, the poem gal­lops forth again.

My reading will begin at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. GMT, and run for a bit under three hours. Play it in the back­ground while you relax or putter; it would be my honor to be invited into your home on the first day of 2024.

The broad­cast is already sched­uled on YouTube, and you can press a button over there to receive a reminder, if that’s helpful. I’ll send a quick newsletter on the morning of Jan­uary 1 with another link.

Cosmic rays

Here at the close of the year, I wonder if you might give another chance to The Greatest Remaining Hits, the second album from The Cotton Modules, launched back in May 2023. If you’d like to skip the prologue, or even most of the album, listen at least to the track titled Cosmic Hemophiliac; in a round­about way, it is the song of a par­tic­ular char­acter in my new novel, forth­coming in June 2024.

Bit of a sneak preview, there.

It’s always a sur­prise to dis­cover that your sense of what the world wants is simply: incorrect. I love this album — the sci-fi concept, the tap­pable story, the songs themselves, my band­mate Jesse’s won­derful compositions … but/and it landed with a great resounding doink. Music is tough, I acknowl­edge; a whole dif­ferent atten­tion ecology. Bummer! Onward.

(Several years ago, the non-reception of my short story titled Proposal for a Book to be Adapted into a Movie Star­ring Dwayne The Rock Johnson pro­duced a sim­ilar sur­prise. Preparing to publish, I felt giddy: totally sure I had iso­lated and ampli­fied a res­o­nant cul­tural frequency. I was wrong!)

Speaking of Jesse Solomon Clark: ear­lier this year, he com­posed the immersive, multi-channel score for an absolutely wild installation that’s cur­rently live in London. I wish I could tele­port over and wander around in that phan­tas­magor­ical space with Jesse’s music in my ears.

Podcast as intellectual project

I’ve been lis­tening to Big Biology. As a pod­cast, it is incan­des­cent with ideas that are, as advertised, really big. It’s even more impressive, though, as an intel­lec­tual project. There is a sense of real work being done here, of ideas devel­oping from episode to episode.

The hosts are nerdy and sharp, with an appealing sort of Bert and Ernie quality. They’re ter­rific at hop­scotching around, recalling pre­vious con­ver­sa­tions, putting dif­ferent guests into vir­tual con­ver­sa­tion with each other.

So much media feels like a treadmill: writing for the sake of writing, talking for the sake of talking … even newsletter-ing for the sake of newsletter-ing, some­times! This pod­cast is some­thing really dif­ferent.

The pod­cast has been run­ning for sev­eral years, and there’s a big archive to explore. I started with episode 39, about bio­elec­tric computation, which I strongly rec­om­mend as an on-ramp. The guest is ter­rific and the sci­ence is dizzying.

Episode 9 is wondrous; Sara Walker, whose lab inves­ti­gates the ori­gins of life, sparkles and provokes. In that way, the episode pro­vides both an out­line of cool new ideas and a por­trait of a mind on fire.

My brain was vibrating in my skull as I lis­tened to episode 10, about the tan­gled tree of life. The guest, David Quammen, is a sci­ence journalist: clear-eyed, well-spoken, even courtly.

I loved the wide frame of episode 63, about the sur­vival and evo­lu­tion of whole ecosys­tems (think: a savanna) through means other than nat­ural selection.

It was episode 100 that helped me under­stand what’s really going on here. It’s a won­derful, inte­gra­tive “clip show”, weaving together ideas (and snip­pets of audio) from all the pre­vious episodes. How cool.

I’ve only lis­tened to these and maybe three other episodes, total. There’s still so much to enjoy and learn as I make my way through the archive.

You listen to a pod­cast like Big Biology, you read a web­site like Quanta Magazine, and you under­stand that so many invo­ca­tions of sci­ence in pop­ular dis­course are woe­fully out of date.

I’m thinking specif­i­cally about the way “sur­vival of the fittest” is used as a master metaphor all over the place — in culture, business, politics, you name it. The metaphor is simple, linear, vicious; it is offered as reluc­tant acknowl­edge­ment of hard reality.

But evo­lu­tionary biol­o­gists left that model behind like … fifty years ago. The drama of evo­lu­tion, as we under­stand it today, is much richer: with coop­er­a­tion right at the foun­da­tion of eukary­otic life (with the domes­ti­ca­tion of the mito­chon­drion and chloroplast), with the sur­prise of hor­i­zontal gene transfer (revealing, for example, the strong pos­si­bility that mam­malian ges­ta­tion and birth was made pos­sible long ago by a VIRAL INFECTION) … It’s all just vastly weirder than the vicious metaphor.

These ideas have dif­ferent implications, in turn, if you want to con­nect them to culture, business, politics, you name it. Although: metaphor­ical deploy­ment is not required.

You listen to Big Biology, you read a web­site like Quanta Magazine, and you under­stand that there are people in the world inves­ti­gating big, exciting ques­tions every day; keeping at it, with stub­born curiosity, across decades. They have far out­paced the crusty metaphors. It’s pos­sible, and very rewarding, to sprint and catch up.

(Still gnawing on the same bone here:)

Often, I’ve encoun­tered the sen­ti­ment that mate­rialism drains the enchant­ment out of the world; that it is bleak and mechanistic — a dry alter­na­tive to the spir­i­tual nour­ish­ment of reli­gion and myth.

Anyone making this claim doesn’t under­stand — has not both­ered to check in with — the real con­ver­sa­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions of mate­rialists today. Even with Big Biology alone as your reference, you would conclude: this is invigorating, nour­ishing stuff: your cup run­neth over. The real story (and atten­dant mystery) of life on Earth, on all scales, puts to shame every myth, every fable, every tale of the divine.

To be clear, I like a lot of those tales just fine. Even so, I’ll hap­pily con­cede that the rich­ness of real plan­e­tary processes makes them seem, by comparison, like scrib­bled crayon sketches.

I wonder, finally, if one of the sig­na­tures of humanness, and human intelligence, is: the experiment.

All of these are ver­sions of the same activity:

• troubleshooting a car
• debugging a computer program
• devising a science experiment

In every case, there’s a par­tic­ular kind of cre­ativity at work, as you imagine and engi­neer a lens, a filter, a … set of … tweezers? … in order to iso­late a bit of new knowl­edge about the world.

I’m sure there are a few other ani­mals known to per­form simple experiments; I’d love to learn which. Humans, though — we do it all day!

Here’s a term that’s new to me:

Spolia, the Latin word for “spoils”, are defined as archi­tec­tural frag­ments taken out of their orig­inal con­text and reused in a dif­ferent con­text; essentially, pieces of struc­tures trans­planted into dif­ferent struc­tures. An example of unin­ten­tional usage of spolia is the Mau­soleum at Halikar­nassos (modern-day Bodrum in Turkey). Fol­lowing its burial due to an earthquake, both the Knights of St John and the Turks, who later set­tled in the region, viewed the former mon­u­ment as a con­ve­nient source of con­struc­tion mate­rials, using spolia to build a castle and houses, respectively.

You prob­ably “know” that car man­u­fac­turing is an amazing, high-tech process, but when’s the last time you actu­ally saw a car factory?

This short pro­mo­tional video from Toyota is bland and dorky, but no amount of dork­i­ness can dilute the fab­u­lous engi­neering on dis­play here.

It’s healthy, I think, to behold real INDUSTRY. In a world of so many ghostly promises, so many vague disappointments, this kind of work still inspires awe.

The video game studio Inkle, who made one of my favorites of all time, has just released A High­land Song for Mac, PC, and Nin­tendo Switch. The game looks beautiful; I’ve pur­chased my copy and I can’t wait to play.

Here’s a short, per­fect blog post from M. John Harrison.

Forget the wheel; it’s all about the tire.

Who and what was a knocker-upper? What an era; what a job.

Here is my favorite album art of 2023:

We love Guillermo del Toro! We love Hayao Miyazaki! We love Guillermo del Toro talking about Hayao Miyazaki!

I shared this video sev­eral years ago, and had occa­sion to watch it again recently. It remains won­derful: “I’m basi­cally surfing a power plant on a river.”

In other power gen­er­a­tion news: here’s the story of how the gas tur­bine con­quered the elec­tric power industry. This is a great chron­icle of inven­tion in the real world: slow but steady.

Construction Physics is a ter­rific project — I’m just so impressed by every­thing that Brian Potter writes over there.

During the olive harvest, I tried reading October, China Miéville’s his­tory of the Russian Revo­lu­tion of 1917. It was ulti­mately too boring and/or I was gen­er­ally too sleepy; after chip­ping away three pages at a time for weeks, I set the book aside.

But not before learning the details of the leg­endary train that car­ried Lenin from his exile in Switzerland, across Germany, back toward Russia:

The “sealed train” would not tech­ni­cally be sealed: much stranger, it would be an extrater­ri­to­rial entity, a rolling-stock legal nullity.

That’s so tasty it might as well be some­thing from a Miéville story. It made me think of The City & The City, its incred­ible drama­ti­za­tion of legal and ter­ri­to­rial marbling. That’s one of the truly great novels of the 2000s — highly rec­om­mended, if you’ve never read it.

Edward Penfield is a legend, of course; I have the sense of an illustrator’s style ampli­fied or even “per­fected” by the techology of his time. Look at a cover like this one—the way the wonk­i­ness of the printing works both with and against the image. You could spend a LOT of time in Pho­to­shop trying to repli­cate those effects.

I love the sort of … emotional narrative? … we can detect in the three covers above, which descend in chrono­log­ical order, 1895 to 1896 to 1897. From a fes­tive hol­iday at home, to a refreshing walk outside, to … leave me alone in the corner.

Happy hol­idays! Mark your cal­endar for Jan­uary 1. The Green Knight awaits.

Back in Oakland,

Robin

December 2023