Inevitable
technologies
of lightness

Trespassers!!

A couple of week­ends ago, I attended the Vintage Com­puter Festival. The parking lot at the Com­puter His­tory Museum was a nightmare — every engi­neer in Santa Clara County had dragged their chil­dren out to pay homage. Inside, the vibe was hybrid museum exhibit/flea market, all the old machines set up on card tables, their wiz­ened cus­to­dians hovering, eager to answer ques­tions. I saw com­puters from my youth and com­puters from ear­lier still. Com­puters without screens, even. In a con­fer­ence room, a ring of all-in-one Macs from var­ious eras attracted 2020s kids, mothlike: a uni­ver­sally great design.

My favorite was the table of 1990s monitors: goliath CRTs, glass an inch thick. One, I remem­bered from the show­room at the com­puter retailer where my dad worked; its ori­en­ta­tion was vertical, like a printed page. Pure mono­chrome, sharp as a tack.

I’m typing this newsletter on an M1 Mac­Book with a glitchy screen; will anyone ever set this model out on a card table? Could it earn the atten­tion of a 2060s kid? Hard to imagine, at this moment. But time bur­nishes things in sur­prising ways.

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 August 2025. 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:

• Moon­bound update: dragon embryology!

• Summer reading: people who make books; people who make software.

• Robin’s thoughts: Local Economy; solar economy.

• Links and recommendations: pottery, poetry, lots more.

Moonbound update

Thank you for your warm recep­tion of Moon­bound’s paper­back, with its sub­stan­tial and supern­erdy appendix, detailed here. Judging from my inbox, the increased volume of reac­tions and ques­tions, it seems to have reached a whole new group of readers. The system works!

On the writing front, I am in deep on some Moon­bound/Penumbra fusion shit. I might not come out the other side of this for a while. (There’s a major clue lurking in the Moon­bound appendix.)

Here is some dragon sci­ence for you.

Math­e­mati­cian and AI researcher Daniel Murfet has recently been tracing the “embryology” of AI lan­guage models as they develop during training, and you can see why he calls them “baby ser­pents”:

Daniel writes:

The rainbow is made of tokens. [ … ] The baby ser­pent is a mess, but the mature ser­pent is handsome. Why?

He observes that the lan­guage model develops a “spacing fin” to help it nav­i­gate the ter­rors of text formatting:

Recalling that lan­guage models are not pro­grammed but grown, vines on a trellis of code, I think the term “embryology” is apt — less analogy than direct description.

Inter­esting to glimpse a baby dragon, isn’t it?

A few recent posts on my tech blog:

• Platform reality (this one res­onated with a lot of people)

• How the uni­verse stores infor­ma­tion (two dashed hopes that seem to rhyme)

• Oxide dreams (a com­pany doing the strangest thing)

There are lots more, including some brief links. Took a while to warm up again, but I think I might really be blogging!

Summer reading

The Book-Makers

You can learn so much, and there’s still so much to learn.

I’ve read a lot about books and their his­tory — approached the sub­ject from many angles — yet there were, in these pages, objects and char­ac­ters totally new to me.

Just for starters, there is the Bib­lical Harmony, a kind of bespoke book assem­bled from the raw mate­rial of the Gospels. With careful scissors, a har­mo­nizer would lib­erate verses, often indi­vidual words, from the printed original:

This was pious cutting, a strange kind of bib­lical schol­ar­ship which looks to us today more like a very neat ver­sion of a ransom note [ … ] What they were after was har­mony: har­mony between the four dif­ferent accounts of Christ’s life in the four Gospels, achieved through this process of cutting, reordering, and glueing.

There’s a great chapter on these har­mo­nizers, dense with detail — and with pictures, too, of their wild cyborg gospels. This is all hap­pening in the year 1634, by the way!

Adam Smyth’s focus in The Book-Makers is mate­riality and humanity: “a his­tory of the book with people put back in:”

not a techno-determinist account where abstract mechan­ical forces drive change, not a chronology of inventions, but a nar­ra­tive teeming with lives, and a his­tory that is full of con­tin­gen­cies and quirks, the suc­cesses and failures, the routes for­ward and the paths not taken, of these eigh­teen book-makers. People make books, and this is a his­tory of the ways they have done so.

For the writer and the printer, this mate­rial is inspiring and actionable. For the reader and the bibliophile, it is simply: delicious.

Some­thing about printing seems to be magnetic, in the sense of inter­acting pow­er­fully with charged particles — charged intellects. What a roster Adam Smyth has assem­bled here. What electricity. This is a club you want to be part of.

We learn that, for most of print’s his­tory, the cen­tral figure was the printer-publisher: a rich fusion, polit­ical-eco­nomic-artistic. (Benjamin Franklin is archetypal, and Adam’s rol­licking pro­file is, on its own, worth the price of admission.) Gradually, starting in the 19th cen­tury and cul­mi­nating in the 20th, the two activ­i­ties move apart, in terms of both pro­fes­sion and proximity. So it comes to pass that, in the 21st cen­tury, a writer never sees the press upon which their work is reproduced.

That’s con­sis­tent with broader trans­for­ma­tions — var­ious atom­iza­tions and virtualizations — and, what­ever its eco­nomic implications, this change for sure, without ques­tion makes the whole enter­prise less fun.

Back to the presses we go.

The Book-Makers is fabulous. I spotted it on the shelf in Sonoma and I had a ball reading it.

Software People

A few months ago, I came across a copy of Soft­ware People, a memoir of the early com­puter industry by Dou­glas G. Carl­ston, and I’ve con­tinued to think about the book’s cen­tral insight:

Carl­ston describes a nascent industry with an incred­ible rate of change. The years from 1977 to 1984 were absolutely insane — whole new mar­kets being born, many with­ering just as fast. In terms of capa­bility leaps between generations — think of going from an Altair with a row of lights and switches on its face to an Apple II with high-res graphics — I think it was, in rel­a­tive terms, at least as dizzying as the AI industry 2018-2025. Periods that loom out­sized in tech’s cul­tural memory — or at least in my ver­sion of it — are here com­pressed into six-month windows.

A lot of people want to tell you that, with the arrival of the AI lan­guage models, we have entered a new era of tech­no­log­ical change. I don’t dis­pute that the dollar amounts have mush­roomed since the Soft­ware People era, or that more actual humans are participating. And yet … I guess I would say: read Soft­ware People, and tell me it doesn’t feel the same.

I’m always inter­ested in the argu­ment that some par­tic­ular period of time was more dynamic than the rest. The turn of the 20th cen­tury is a pop­ular can­di­date. So is: right now.

But, you read his­tory — par­tic­ularly of periods often clas­si­fied as stagnant: the Middle Ages, for example — and what do you discover? Con­stant change. Great leaps in tech­nology. Con­stant rene­go­ti­a­tion of the terms of busi­ness and life.

I’m not saying change is spread evenly through time, a layer of butter applied per­fectly to the toast of his­tory. What I am saying is, your basic hypoth­esis ought to be that people in the past lived through times as dynamic and tumul­tuous as our own.

The mes­sage that it’s NEVER been like it is RIGHT NOW, because things have NEVER been changing so FAST, is at best vanity, and more often propaganda.

P.S. Was there ever a better com­pany name than Spec­trum HoloByte??

Where the Axe Is Buried

You know I am a raving lunatic for Ray Nayler’s The Moun­tain in the Sea, which seems to keep recruiting readers and fans — a book with real momentum.

Ear­lier this year, I read Ray’s new novel, and I will con­fess that the begin­ning was a chal­lenge: dropped into a chilly milieu, I strug­gled to find the cus­tomary footholds of near-future sci-fi. Even so, I was con­fi­dent in Ray’s skill, and that con­fi­dence was rewarded, as the book accel­er­ated into a story with roaring con­tem­po­rary resonance.

How does the cliché go? Science fic­tion is really about the present, not the future. Sure, sometimes. This time, yes: Where the Axe Is Buried is, in so many ways, about RIGHT NOW, and the reading expe­ri­ence is charged with real urgency and, honestly, dread.

I’ve written before about my pride at being on the MCD roster, my affinity for the other writers there — a rare feeling in pub­lishing these days. Ray is chief among those “labelmates” who make me think, wow, I’m lucky to be part of some­thing like this.

Automatic Noodle

I haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s Auto­matic Noodle, but my copy just arrived and I will let Annalee set the stage:

The San Fran­cisco of Auto­matic Noodle is almost unrecognizable. It’s the year 2064, five years after Cal­i­fornia has won a war of inde­pen­dence against the United States. The peace is fragile, and the city is strug­gling to rebuild in the ruins left by bombs and atmos­pheric rivers that pummel the coasts with storm after storm. Our main char­ac­ters are four robots, left behind in a ghost kitchen, and their human friend. None of them are exactly cit­i­zens of this new nation, but they want to make a life here.

The prospect of a Newitz novella with four robots at its heart is exciting, because Annalee is per­haps the world’s fore­most ven­tril­o­quist of non­human intelligence. I’m thinking of the ani­mals of The Terraformers, and espe­cially of the robots of Autonomous, voices that are rich and full yet legit­i­mately robotic, informed by the real grain of computation: verbose, a bit anxious, invested in protocol.

Annalee’s imag­i­na­tion in this domain sets the standard, so, as both a reader and a writer, I am eager to meet these new minds, in a new San Fran­cisco.

Make Your Manuscript Work

Laura Portwood-Stacer’s new book is just out: Make Your Man­u­script Work, aimed at schol­arly writers. It looks terrific, a wel­come com­panion to Laura’s The Book Pro­posal Book. The pair sug­gest a useful sequence: first you sell it, then you make it great. (Perhaps this will become a trilogy some day. I’m imag­ining Bring It to the People: How Not to Hate the Streaming Adap­ta­tion of Your Schol­arly Book 😋)

If you are an aca­d­emic author (or aspiring, in either category) these books pro­vide canny, foun­da­tional direction. Laura’s newsletter is also an ongoing source of prac­tical wisdom — and not only for aca­d­emic authors!

New M. John Har­rison next year!

Plus, Mike’s anti-memoir is coming to the U.S. soon. I imported the U.K. edi­tion, of course; read it ear­lier this year; and loved it — a singular, superstrange, inspiring piece of work. I’ll write a little more about it when the U.S. edi­tion appears in September.

Robin Rendle’s book recommendations are so lovely, because they are braided into his real life, his thinking. Please: write book recs like this! Tell us about how books have moved with you, in your mind, your body.

A while back, I read Hal­cyon Drift by Bryan Stableford, pub­lished in 1972, per­fectly pulpy, and found myself struck by the typo­graphic beauty of the phrase … 

 … instantaneous disintegration!

Adam Roberts reminds us that the movie Total Recall was adapted from a Philip K. Dick short with “one of the truly great SF story titles”: We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.

This year, Anne Trubek has been unspooling an inter­esting and impor­tant series of posts on the his­tory of copy­right in America.

Here’s the first, on the encour­age­ment of Lit­er­a­ture and Genius.

Here’s the second, in which everyone is rip­ping everyone else off.

Here’s the third, on the dif­fer­ence between a copy­right and the right to publish.

It’s all very smart, pointed stuff, pre­sented with verve — which is just another way of saying, Anne Trubek wrote it — and, more than anything, it’s useful to encounter copy­right as some­thing novel; contested; contingent. These ain’t the laws of physics. Cre­ative work has cir­cu­lated under dif­ferent regimes, and it will do so again … sooner than any­body thinks.

I heard from a reader who was a bit confused, because my novella The Suit­case Clone had popped up in their Sour­dough e-book. It appeared to this reader, briefly, that the one had replaced the other! A visit to the table of con­tents cleared things up: The Suit­case Clone had, in fact, appeared at the end, where they left off after fin­ishing the novel, years ago.

On one hand: it’s cool that an e-book can receive new mate­rial. If you bought a Sour­dough paper­back in 2018, you didn’t get The Suit­case Clone; if you buy one in 2025, you do. Meanwhile, the 2018 e-book, down in the dark of your Kindle archive, qui­etly grows a new chunk of pages.

On the other hand: it’s rather slip­pery that an e-book can receive new mate­rial! Just an unwel­come reminder that e-books are not “yours” in the way paper­backs are “yours”. Hardly any of the ways.

Robin’s thoughts

Local reality

The AI and AI-adjacent com­mu­ni­ties of the San Fran­cisco Bay Area have been get­ting a lot of press lately, and I always want to push back, not because that par­tic­ular ver­sion of the Bay Area doesn’t exist — the land of the overthinkers — but because it is just one among many.

That ver­sion looms large on the internet, in part because it pro­duces a lot of words. There are, however, many alternatives, and the fact that their exis­tence is less tex­tual and more phys­ical only bol­sters their claim to, well, reality.

There is, after all, the Bay Area of (just choosing a can­di­date at random here … ) Sour­dough! Or the Bay Area of Lawrence Liv­er­more National Lab. Of the Golden Sardine! Naturally, I love the Bay Area of Richmond’s On-Line Bindery, and of Berkeley’s Trumer Brewery. There are a lot of people doing phys­ical work out here. It’s not all words and it’s not all code.

One vital ver­sion is, of course, the Bay Area of Alexis Madrigal, which he has help­fully rendered in rich detail. It’s just so much more inter­esting than the Bay Area of the overthinkers.

And, in reality news: Alexis and Sarah Rich have secured a store­front in Rockridge, where their new com­mu­nity hub and cul­ture space, called Local Economy, will soon open its doors. If you’re a reader in the East Bay, this is some­thing you’ll want to track closely. For me, Local Economy’s arrival con­jures the feeling of meeting someone who you under­stand instantly will be an impor­tant part of your life.

It will for sure be an impor­tant part of this place. Subscribe to the email list!

Solar inevitability

I’ve been rumi­nating on the tragedy of the U.S. government’s turn away from renew­able energy, a poten­tially world-historic case of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Or, not defeat: delay. Though, where cli­mate is concerned, at a cer­tain point, one becomes the other.

But, the truth is, this cal­cu­la­tion is barely about cli­mate anymore. It’s instead about a set of tech­nolo­gies so potent and ele­gant that they are basi­cally undeniable. Our civilization’s energy will come from the sun; it will be stored in batteries. Humanity will employ a few other tech­nolo­gies here and there, par­tic­ularly in extreme environments. But, in the long run, and to a first approximation, it’s the sun, and it’s batteries.

I’m never not thrilled by the golden WHOMP of solar; meanwhile, the purple BLORP of bat­tery dis­charge is a wel­come addi­tion to the view. (Two years ago, in August 2023, bat­tery dis­charge in Cal­i­fornia peaked around 3 GW. Today, it peaks above 10 GW!)

This trans­for­ma­tion is inevitable. The eco­nomics of it, the pure physics, are just too attractive. But now, it will take longer, at least in the U.S. The green man sleeps in the hill. We wait.

For the grid watchers: here is a sub­limely nerdy X-ray of the recent power outage on the Iberian peninsula.

Links and recommendations

Here is Marc Wei­den­baum at the Ruth Asawa retrospective :

It’s like the sculp­tures are the guitar solo, and the shadows are the result of delay and reverb pedals.

Here is Florentyna Leow on Oki­nawan pottery! And again, on Raku! There’s a whole lovely series col­lected here.

Here’s Jim Rion exploring word choice in translation with an inter­esting and illus­tra­tive case.

Here is a recent Con­gres­sional Research Ser­vice report on naming con­ven­tions for Navy ships. Oddly compelling.

Here is Claire L. Evans for Quanta Magazine: What can a cell remember? A great match, a dizzying sub­ject.

The title of Claire’s newsletter defines her project these past few years: Wild Information. Maybe we can con­vince her to dig into dragon sci­ence … 

Behold Marcin Wichary, standing athwart the web browser, shouting: HERE IS YOUR HYPERMEDIA!

Here is the home page of Avi Bryant, a bril­liant col­league from my Twitter days: per­sonal web­site as straightfor­ward expla­na­tion of “wot I’m doing right now.” It’s a nice thing! (And, no sur­prise, wot Avi is doing is fascinating … )

Here is a new app/platform for comics creators that looks very nice.

I sort of wish I had the need to “type equa­tions at the speed of thought with this spe­cial­ized keypad” … 

The Sky Calendar from Abrams Plan­e­tarium at Michigan State Uni­ver­sity is the coolest thing you can get in the mail for $12. The design is clever and intuitive — always a plea­sure to explore.

Yun Hai’s new lunisolar almanac looks great. I expect that you will hear about this from me again in November.

Fat Gold made a sur­prise appear­ance on the Wire­cutter podcast, a favorite of editor Michael Sullivan:

MICHAEL: So one of my favorites is Fat Gold, and they’re actu­ally based in Cal­i­fornia. They’re mod­er­ately priced. It’s just reli­ably good, and it’s so fla­vorful and robust, and it’s one of my faves. And we’ll actu­ally be trying some today … 

They try it! It’s mildly terrifying, like a book review!

Oh, look, it’s the per­fect robot to kill you in your bed.

People … just fold your clothes … 

I’m delighted that Derek Thompson is out there just like … Derek-ing! Here is the dis­aster that is the housing market for young people; here are AI macroeco­nomics. His writing voice is, as always, peppy but/and precise, and his sub­jects are exactly the things I want to read about. Lucky me! Lucky us.

I’m excited about this forth­coming book from J. W. Mason:

The title Against Money is trying to do a few dif­ferent things. Most directly, it high­lights the dis­tinction between the net­work of money pay­ments and values, on the one hand, and the social and mate­rial reality that depends on them. The latter, we argue, oper­ates by quite dif­ferent logics. When we say against money, we mean not only that money has acquired an out­sized hold on life in the real world; it has. We also mean “against” in the same way one might dis­tin­guish a figure against a background: by writing about money, we seek to clarify our vision of the social world that exists around, out­side and in oppo­si­tion to money. The title also announces our crit­i­cism of familiar ways of thinking as well as our chal­lenge to the dom­i­nant view of money within eco­nomics. Finally, the title links the book to a polit­ical project that seeks to tran­scend mar­kets and prop­erty rights as the orga­nizing prin­ci­ples of eco­nomic life — to imagine a future in which money no longer defines the scope and pos­si­bil­i­ties of our col­lec­tive exis­tence.

Here is a post titled Myths and Lessons from a Cen­tury of Amer­ican Automaking and — I say this as a child of Metro Detroit — it is really useful, always, to con­front the pos­si­bility: what if the car­toon his­tory in my head is wrong?

I sup­pose any­time someone writes a discursive, linky newsletter, I read it as implicit defense of my own discursive, linky newsletters, so nat­u­rally I love the form. Jasmine Sun’s is beau­ti­fully constructed — a view into a mind at work. This is how you do it!

Speaking of links: The Syllabus is con­sis­tently good — weekly links from a whole other internet. Fairly aca­d­emic, but that’s okay: we like a bit of friction. I always open these newsletters, and often find myself sur­prised.

Here is Danny Boyle in the Cri­te­rion closet, brim­ming over with enthusiasm.

Let’s think about the format that is the Cri­te­rion closet:

1. Makes people look smarter, rather than dumber;
2. invites them to praise other artists, other work; and
3. demonstrates the way in which praise is reflected back upon the giver, a positive-sum game, with no limit to the size of the pie.

It’s good!

My note to myself after reading about the con­cept of entropic gravity:

it’s good to think new thoughts

Could you get to orbit … in a balloon?? Honestly, I love it. A tech­nology of light­ness, rather than heaviness; of going with the flow, rather than straining against it.

Nothing here is impossible.

The rocket equa­tion is too gnarly a tyrant; there’s no beating it, only enduring it. Humanity ought to be searching, scrounging, des­perate for other ways to rise.

Here is Kieran Healy at his nat­u­ral­iza­tion ceremony:

I know the nation­al­i­ties of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin repre­sented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, imme­di­ately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven coun­tries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in par­tic­ular was enormously, irre­sistibly moving. It per­fectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth — as you please — that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explic­itly and proudly acknowl­edge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the repub­lican ideal not just that anyone can become an Amer­ican, but that this pos­si­bility is what makes the country what it is.

It’s a stir­ring scene, a beau­tiful post all around. That’s via Alan Jacobs.

Auden, The Fall of Rome—terrific, via, once again, Adam Roberts.

Here’s Teresa Nielsen Hayden, ca. 1995:

My own per­sonal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We’re hardly more than an eye­blink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an inter­glacia­tion removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely inter­esting ancient times.

Here is a remem­brance of the poet Jane Greer, leading off with one of her poems, which I loved.

This edi­tion of my newsletter is illus­trated with photos by Anthony Angel, drawn from the col­lec­tion at the Library of Con­gress. These were a bequest from the pho­tog­ra­pher upon his death in 1967: more than 60,000 exposures, of which about 1,500 are avail­able online, all with no rights restrictions.

Sixty thou­sand images … from an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­pher … who was, it seems, mostly a recluse, prob­ably a creep … who wan­dered the streets of Man­hattan with his cameras … that’s A LOT.

And nothing spectacular, per­haps. The cura­tors at the Library of Con­gress have strug­gled, over the years, to say much beyond, well, we have these.

Yet it’s the kind of mate­rial that ages well. Seven decades later, the mono­chrome view shim­mers with novelty. I found myself captivated by the archive.

Here’s Anthony Angel himself, a selfie, one of many in the col­lec­tion. It’s all very strange, a bit sad, a bit beau­tiful.

We can cel­e­brate two achieve­ments here: the endurance of phys­ical media, the light­ness of dig­ital access. I’m glad to have both together, right now, in this time, as dynamic and tumul­tuous as any other, which is saying a lot.

From Oakland,

Robin

August 2025