How to build
a spaceship

This edi­tion offers a behind-the-scenes pre­view of an upcoming release. It’s also a record of a kind of project that I can now enthu­si­as­ti­cally recommend.

There’s no room for public domain art in this one — you’ll see why.

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

As many of you know, I’m in a band with Jesse Solomon Clark, called The Cotton Mod­ules. About eigh­teen months ago, we released our first album, the product of a hybrid human/AI collaboration.

That first outing received such a warm recep­tion (e.g., in this interview, and from many of you) that we felt encour­aged and ener­gized to dig deeper into the tech­niques we had discovered.

Our forth­coming release, titled The Greatest Remaining Hits, is a sci-fi con­cept album that rep­re­sents a huge leap for­ward in quality and appeal. We’ve dialed in a com­bi­na­tion of human craft and AI weird­ness that we believe is totally unique; as far as we know, there’s nobody else in the world using these tools in this way.

But this newsletter isn’t about the album, which won’t arrive until May.

It’s about the space­ship!

Greebling

Again, this is a sci-fi con­cept album. To intro­duce it, I’ve written a new short story, which we’ll pub­lish along­side the songs. The impor­tant thing to know, for now, is that it’s about the voyage of the Deep Space Sloop John Bethel.

At some point, Jesse and I decided we ought to actu­ally build this space­ship. It would be useful, we reasoned, to have a “hero” prop for var­ious mar­keting materials … and a phys­ical object might cut against the dig­ital grain of the album in a cool way, right? Regardless, building a real model sounded like more fun than pushing wire­frames around a screen.

We basi­cally fol­lowed this video from Adam Savage step-by-step.

He is a civic treasure.

Our first task was to imagine a sil­hou­ette that wasn’t already claimed by another sci-fi franchise. The Bethel is car­rying thou­sands of pas­sen­gers to a dis­tant planet; we imag­ined a flying city block, like the ones in Barcelona — those beau­tiful cham­fered donuts of life.

We played with the shape a bit, then made a paper model, just to con­firm that it looked inter­esting.

To scale it up, we obtained sheets of plain white polysterene, beloved by model train enthu­si­asts and archi­tects alike. As we learned from Adam Savage, poly­styrene is a joy to work with. You don’t have to cut all the way through — instead, you just score the sheet lightly, then bend and snap along the line.

It is like­wise very easy to assemble, using a clear sol­vent that you brush across your joint; the plastic melts and bonds almost instantly.

Sooner than we expected, our basic form was complete.

So far, so good — but this Bethel was just a box of white plastic.

It was the next step that had, for me, moti­vated the whole project.

Any sci-fi nerd of a cer­tain depth and/or vin­tage knows about GREEBLING, the tech­nique ubiq­ui­tous in movie model shops — like the fabled Indus­trial Light and Magic — for adding visual interest to a plain, smooth model.

The tech­nique is: buy a bunch of old model kits and bash them together!

Think of the iconic space­ships of the orig­inal Star Wars trilogy (none of which I will depict here, for I do not want you to com­pare them to ours): all thickly encrusted with tiny struc­tural details, appro­pri­ated from battleships, artillery cannons, fighter planes, submarines, and more.

These details are called gree­bles, and the process of placing them is there­fore: gree­bling.

I have wanted to greeble some­thing for a very, very long time. Maybe for my entire con­scious life. I regret that it took me this many years to get here, because it was exactly as much fun as I imag­ined.

(If you feel the same impulse, you should know that it’s easier and more tractable than I’d ever imag­ined. Adam Savage awaits, ready to instruct you.)

The cosmic thing about gree­bling is, there’s no master plan. Jesse and I took turns. Pick an inter­esting plastic bit from the pile, hold it up to a place on the model — “this? here? yeah?”—and glue it down.

Greeble by greeble, your space­ship takes shape, its whole theory of design and oper­a­tion emerging organ­i­cally from the bits avail­able.

As intox­i­cated as I was by the expe­ri­ence of gree­bling — no, it was NOT the sol­vent fumes — I couldn’t deny that the ship still looked like a bunch of random garbage glued together.

BUT! Adam Savage had assured us that a single coat of gray primer would pull every­thing together: a sudden, snap­ping sus­pen­sion of disbelief.

So we painted … 

 … and he was right!

Behold, the DSS John Bethel. What a beauty.

Having secured our talent, we arranged a photo shoot.

We cap­tured imagery for slow flybys through starfields. These spare, lan­guid videos will accom­pany our album in its YouTube incarnation.

We have no illu­sions of sci-fi grandeur. This is the sim­plest imag­in­able appli­ca­tion of a process that was invented and per­fected in the 1970s (not far from where I’m typing this), now re-enacted crudely, but happily, by The Cotton Mod­ules.

You’ll have to wait for the album’s release to see the Bethel in motion, but right now, I can show you some­thing else.

A few weeks after we’d fin­ished with the model and the green screen, we were dis­cussing ideas for album art. I men­tioned some­thing about the Voy­ager probe’s Golden Record, and how a riff on that design might be evocative. Jesse replied, “Are you kidding? We built a space­ship! LET’S USE THE SPACESHIP!”

We used the space­ship.

Listen, I’m sure lots of people — including some of you reading this newsletter — could whip up a per­fectly con­vincing image in a 3D mod­eling program. Ray-traced, naturally, with vir­tual gree­bles sparkling in the hard light.

But, scroll back! Look again at the box of white plastic we started with. Isn’t it cool to know THAT thing is THIS thing? Doesn’t the gap between the real and the imag­i­nary pro­duce a tremen­dous crackle of energy?

This con­nects to the way Jesse and I use AI, too. For us, the tech­nology doesn’t make any­thing faster, easier, or simpler. Far from it: AI makes our pro­duc­tion slower, more difficult, more complex.

We put up with it because the results are con­sis­tently sur­prising and evocative.

That’s one of the argu­ments embedded in this album: AI in art — in music, specifically — shouldn’t be about automa­tion and imitation. It should be (just like every other tool and tech­nique) about making new oper­a­tions pos­sible, and pro­ducing sounds you’ve never heard before.

I’m very glad Jesse and I built the DSS John Bethel, and I can’t wait to tell you its whole story.

To tide you over until the new Cotton Mod­ules album arrives, here’s a fresh one from Jesse: Synonyms for Peace, Vol. 1.

Sesame Street Shakespeare

Here is a random YouTube dis­covery that totally mag­ne­tized me.

Playing Shake­speare was a minis­eries first broad­cast in, I think, 1982. The host is John Barton, a long­time director and teacher at the Royal Shake­speare Company; the set­ting is a stage, after hours, with Barton sur­rounded by a coterie of actors who are, at the time of this recording, not yet global superstars: Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Judi Dench … Patrick Stewart!

But they are not even the main appeal. Rather, it’s the show’s format and tone. For me, it evokes Sesame Street; it has the same col­le­gial earnestness. John Barton poses ques­tions and chal­lenges to the actors, who fire back. It’s not entirely natural, but/and the “staginess” is excusable, because, come on!

The first episode is the one that hooked me. It’s about how Shake­speare’s ele­vated lan­guage inter­acts with the modern tra­di­tion of nat­u­ral­istic acting. The dis­cus­sion is brainy, humane, expansive, inviting … I could just keep piling on the pos­i­tive adjectives. It’s wonderful.

They should make shows like this in the 2020s, and not just about acting.

I want you to come back in 30 years

As a cer­ti­fied Craig Mod superfan, I loved reading about the adven­ture that bloomed around his rec­om­men­da­tion of Morioka, Japan as one of the 52 Places to Go in 2023.

I don’t have a New York Times subscription, so I haven’t read the rec­om­men­da­tion itself, but/and, Craig’s reflec­tion on the expe­ri­ence of vis­iting Morioka again after its pub­li­ca­tion is a treasure. There are moments that feel like they belong in a short story, in the best pos­sible way.

One of the people in Morioka who Craig inter­views (and pho­tographs beau­tifully) is a young cafe owner. He writes:

[The cafe] was started in 1976 by Masaaki Taka­hashi and is now run by his daughter, Mana, 39. She took it over in 2019 after her father died of cancer. “I want you to come back in 30 years,” she said. “You’ll see me as an old woman hand-roasting beans in the corner.”

This pinned me to the wall; it con­tinues to resonate, weeks later. I think it’s about the most beau­tiful state­ment you can imagine, about a person and a place together.

You know I love the Bay Area deeply. At the same time, I won’t pre­tend anyone in the Bay Area could make this state­ment. No — because, in the Bay Area, the clock is always ticking. The rent is always rising. Here, there can be no 30-year promises; there can be no set­tling in.

Some people do manage to make and keep 30-year promises here, and they are heroic. It shouldn’t require heroism. It should be matter-of-fact. It should be avail­able to anyone. Everyone!

Of course, other places in the U.S. present a con­verse challenge: will anybody be here in 30 years?

One of Craig’s argu­ments about Morioka is that it’s simply healthy. That feels pretty rad­ical in the unbal­anced urbanity of the 21st century, and it is there­fore worth noticing, and, for sure, celebrating.

Jack Cheng designs his dream house. I sup­pose I’m sen­si­tized to this because Jesse and I just built a phys­ical model of our own … but how could you NOT want to do a few of the exer­cises Jack describes here? What an inviting approach to architecture. Terrific.

There’s a con­nec­tion between this newsletter and the pre­vious edi­tion, its inves­ti­ga­tion into Tolkien’s revi­sions of The Lord of the Rings. They are both connected, in turn, to my new novel, cur­rently being reviewed by my editor at MCD.

The con­nec­tion is worldbuilding, because I’ve done more work of this kind — with this feeling — for the new novel than for any­thing I’ve ever pro­duced before. Not plastic mod­eling, but map­making and terrain-shaping and, yes, even a bit of Tolkien-esque lan­guage invention. Before the book arrives, I’d like to pro­duce some drawings, too.

If you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said this kind of work was mostly procrastination. For the Robin of a decade ago, that was true. Now, with deeper con­fi­dence and expanded ambition, I can make time and space for these explo­rations without get­ting derailed.

Maybe it’s just an indulgence, but I don’t think so. I mean — as a reader, I want to read books by people who make maps and build models! Why shouldn’t I attempt, at last, to be that kind of writer myself?

Okay — I’m headed out on a long trip to another country. There might be some evi­dence on Instagram in the weeks to come. There might also: not be!

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on May 2.

April 2023