Hit the lights

Here in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area, it’s been a mul­ti­modal week. I’ve trav­eled aboard mul­tiple ferries, sev­eral trains — including the new SMART line in Sonoma County, terrific — and, notably, my first robo-car, one of the whirring Waymos that are sud­denly thick in the streets of San Fran­cisco. I found the experience, at last, dizzying and delightful.

There are very rea­son­able crit­i­cisms you can make about robo-cars, including the simple obser­va­tion that they are: still cars. I take those to heart … yet I just cannot go along with any sto­ry­line in which the intro­duc­tion of these swirling, flex­ible fleets nets out as a bad thing.

Waymo’s robo-cars make the world more inter­esting, not less; they open up new possibilities — for the shape of daily life, for urban design, for architecture, energy … the list goes on — rather than fore­close them. (Chenoe Hart’s insta-classic essay, Perpetual Motion Machines, will ignite your imag­i­na­tion in this regard.)

If you live in the Bay Area, I encourage you to install the Waymo app, board a ferry to San Fran­cisco, and take a test ride. You’ll receive a pow­erful pre­mo­ni­tion of the future, wrapped up in a glossy white package that beeps and hums and coos, mar­shaling every sen­sory cue in its attempt to cushion — not quite successfully — the ghostly sight of a steering wheel spin­ning on its own.

I had the thought, sev­eral times while riding: ad-tech this ain’t. The people who worked on these cars accom­plished some­thing dif­fi­cult and mean­ingful. I hope it feels like it.

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

Before I jump into this edition, an alert: Fat Gold, the olive oil com­pany I help operate, is cur­rently having the first big sale in its whole history!

Tins of Cal­i­fornia extra virgin olive oil usu­ally priced at $32 are now $25, with free shipping. When you stock up, you cross-subsidize this newsletter 😉

I used my trusty Riso­graph to pro­duce an ani­ma­tion for our email newsletter about the sale. I also wrote about our inspiration: a leg­endary annual event at a Bay Area institution … 

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

• Moon­bound update: the cover reveal!

• Other news: an upcoming event in San Fran­cisco!

• Links and discussion: with a couple of heart­felt RIPs.

Moonbound update

When did the “cover reveal” become a thing in book publishing? There was a time, before the internet, when a book’s cover was revealed on the day it arrived in bookstores. There’s some­thing appealing about that … but/and, in the age of the algorithm, it doesn’t hurt to pass a beau­tiful image around ahead of time.

That said, there are more and less dra­matic ways of teasing and revealing a cover. Allow me to offer an example.

Typically, before a book is released, advance copies are distributed: to booksellers, librarians, critics, and more. These are flimsy paperbacks, and typ­i­cally they are bound with the book’s final cover.

But my pub­lisher MCD’s approach is some­times atyp­ical. Back in 2012, advance copies of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store cir­cu­lated with this gnomic cover:

Then, when the hard­cover arrived in the fall of that year, it was like switching on the lights in a dark room: TA-DA!

Hold that visual leap in your mind.

As the first advance copies of Moon­bound have crept out into the world, they have worn this cover, sus­pi­ciously plain:

It’s not unpretty; look at that logotype! But clearly … some­thing is being withheld.

So, I invite you to com­plete the visual analogy, SAT-style:

Are you ready for the reveal?

 … 

 … 

 … 

I don’t think you’re ready.

 … 

 … 

 … 

Okay, now you’re ready. Hit the lights!

This is the work of Na Kim, who is, in my estimation, simply the best book cover designer working today. She is, additionally, art director of the Paris Review and an artist in her own right. All in all, it’s a for­mi­dable portfolio, per­fectly con­gruent to her talent, and her spirit.

I have admired Na’s designs for many years, so when Moon­bound began its journey toward publication, I hoped the book might find its way to her desk. Lucky me!

Other news

On Wednesday, Jan­uary 24, at Shack15 in the Ferry Building, I’ll chat with Kyle Chayka about his new book, Filterworld, just pub­lished this week.

I’ve been a reader and fan of Kyle’s for many years; I think he is one of the most inter­esting critics writing today, par­tic­u­larly at the inter­sec­tion of art and technology. He’s also a “fellow traveler”, in the sense of feeling very invested in the internet — having grown up with it; being still, in a sense, in love with it — but/and also disappointed, even revolted, by many of its cur­rent characteristics.

I sus­pect that describes plenty of you reading this, too.

So where does that leave us? What’s the shape of our situation, and where do we go from here? That’s exactly the sub­ject of Filterworld, and I have plenty of ques­tions for Kyle.

A wide-ranging con­ver­sa­tion with a thoughtful author at the beau­tiful Ferry Building is an easy sell — come on out and join us. If you’re in San Fran­cisco, I’ll see you Wednesday.

Links and discussion

I was delighted to find Moon­bound included among Andrew Liptak’s most antic­i­pated books of 2024. His newsletter, Transfer Orbit, has become an essen­tial resource for tracking new and inter­esting sci­ence fiction; if you’re not already a subscriber, I rec­om­mend it.

Recently, I reread the first twenty or so chap­ters of the manga Death Note, mostly to marvel again at the premise. Briefly: a Japanese god of death drops to Earth a magic book with the fol­lowing property: that if you write someone’s name while visu­al­izing their face … they will die. The book is found by a teenage boy; he is both earnest and sociopathic.

He begins to write names.

There are nuances, and the nuances grow to con­sume the series, but at its core, that has got to be one of THE great high con­cepts of all time — a compact, pow­erful engine for plot and story.

In my estimation, the manga loses itself midway through its long run; they ought to have wrapped it up years earlier. But the opening chap­ters are a per­fectly propul­sive puzzle — a daz­zling infor­ma­tion game.

Claude Shannon would have loved Death Note.

I sup­pose at this point I should just set up a com­puter pro­gram to auto-link Erin McKean’s newslet­ters in this space. What can I say? They are catnip! Here are eleven words Erin learned in 2023. My per­sonal favorites are “hyperauthorship” and “tattourism”.

Here’s how you paint a back­ground for a Studio Ghibli movie:

The secret wasn’t hiding in [Kazuo] Oga’s other tools, either. They were typ­ical for anime: things like heavy-duty, 400-pound TMK poster paper, or Japanese flat brushes and fine-pointed Sakuyo brushes. He also had water — for soaking the paper at the start, allowing for more color gra­da­tion and nat­ural textures.

This water put Oga, like all Ghibli back­ground painters, on a strict timer. Their method was straightforward: paint the base coat (ji-nuri) before the paper dried. You had to dash off the bulk of the painting in one go. As Tanaka noted, this only gave you “30 min­utes to 1 hour.” It was tough, and a painter couldn’t afford any distractions.

That’s from the Ani­ma­tion Obsessive, which just keeps get­ting better.

Here is a fas­ci­nating con­sid­er­a­tion of sev­eral new Devana­gari typefaces by Pooja Saxena in her excel­lent newsletter, I Spy with my Typo­graphic Eye.

My favorite is Ikat, a Devana­gari pixel font (!) by Lipi Raval. Just look how cool (and TINY) it is!

Here is Ikat Devana­gari on Future Fonts.

Here is a strange sort of vir­tual arti­fact: Francis Spufford’s unsanc­tioned Narnia novel, unpub­lished, unpublishable. And yet, it exists! And is titled The Stone Table, perfect! And he is Francis Spufford — who wrote Red Plenty, so, odds are, this new chron­icle is wonderful. (I recorded a video cap­sule review of Red Plenty a few years back. Look at that beard … )

What do we do with this infor­ma­tion?

Do we break into Francis Spufford’s office?

I learned about this arti­fact only recently, after enjoying Alan Jacobs’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Francis Spufford’s latest novel. Cahokia Jazz sounds terrific — Alan can make any­thing sound terrific, when he loves it — and I’m eager to check it out.

RIP to Terry Bisson. I knew him best as the mod­er­ator of the SF in SF series, a role in which he was sharp and garrulous. I’ve par­tic­i­pated in sev­eral of the events, always at the lovely American Book­binders Museum in San Fran­cisco, always with Terry at the front table, run­ning the show.

He was a writer in his own right, and I can’t claim to have been a devoted reader … yet, that pro­vides useful evidence: that a rich, expan­sive life pro­duces many kinds of influence. I was in Terry Bisson’s gravity well; I felt the pull.

He presided over a social and cul­tural space that was inviting and stimulating; he helped make San Fran­cisco fun and inter­esting. I call that success.

RIP to Howard Weaver. I never met him in the flesh. Instead, I encoun­tered him as (of all things) a razor-sharp com­menter on the blog I helped write, years ago.

But I knew all about him: his work, his sensibility. He was an ener­getic jour­nalist at the Anchorage Daily News, serving for many years as its editor before moving to Cal­i­fornia to become an exec­u­tive at McClatchy, the regional chain.

This kind of news­paper person, with this kind of news­paper career, is gone now. That’s sad, because it was a good kind. I was never part of that world; I was too late, and anyway, I have the wrong temperament. I only heard stories.

What a thing, to be in the news­room of a prof­itable city paper in America: mis­chief and earnestness, all wrapped up together, on top of the world.

RIP to Howard Weaver, and to a set of eco­nomic and cul­tural arrange­ments that blazed bright for a few decades in this country. Not that many, in the whole sweep of things — but enough to count. It was great while it lasted.

I didn’t intend to end on death, necessarily, but it’s okay that I did. Terry Bisson and Howard Weaver did mean­ingful things in their time on Earth. Both were impor­tant con­trib­u­tors to com­mu­ni­ties that were intel­lec­tual and lit­erary and also, crucially, material. Cities dream of having such fig­ures on their sidewalks.

The chal­lenge is implicit.

San Fran­cisco folks, I’ll see you Wednesday, and we’ll hear from Kyle Chayka about his new book. Let’s all take robo-cars to the event. They’ll gather in a knot of glossy white, right there in front of the Ferry Building. We’ll stop traffic. It will be great.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter around Feb­ruary 24.

Jan­uary 2024