Is it drugs?

Spring has come to the San Fran­cisco Bay Area. Rain falls in weird sudden spurts; puffy clouds tower above the hills, glowing, preposterous. On the street, land­scape design dis­ap­pears beneath feral upwelling; is it still a weed when it’s six feet tall, and beautiful? Every living thing is doing great, or at least better than it was a month ago. An eclipse is coming.

This is a rich edi­tion, so let’s get to 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 March 2024. 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: new framings; a new note on the mini-site

• An appre­ci­a­tion: people who make places

• Links and rec­om­men­da­tions: sound­track for an internet that doesn’t exist

Moonbound update

Pre­orders are the essen­tial fuel for any book’s launch. I’d esti­mate the value of a pre­order, in algo­rithmic and mar­keting terms, at around 10X the value of a sale after pub­li­ca­tion. That’s some serious leverage.

I’m pro­ducing a limited-edi­tion zine that I will mail to folks who have pre­ordered Moon­bound. This is a one-time print run, fea­turing writing and world­building that won’t be avail­able any­where else.

Just for­ward your order con­fir­ma­tion email to pre­order@robinsloan.com. I’ll record your mailing address and ship you a copy of the zine in May, just ahead of Moon­bound’s pub­li­ca­tion in June.

If you need guid­ance on where to pre­order, you can find a random link, drawn from a pool of my favorites, on the front page of my Moon­bound mini-site. Any format is fine, of course: print, dig­ital, or audio.

I’m happy to dis­patch these zines any­where in the world, so if you can wrangle a pre­order out­side the United States … go for it!

A fusillade of frames

The only truly com­plete descrip­tion of a novel is the novel itself. Every shorter descrip­tion — every pitch — nec­es­sarily leaves some­thing (most things) out. You’d better hope it wasn’t the thing that would have hooked your reader, reeled them in!

To avoid making this mistake, I will employ the Itano Circus approach to book mar­keting and describe Moon­bound, eventually, in every pos­sible way. Oh, I’m going to hit that target somehow.

Here are a few ways of framing this new novel for readers of my pre­vious two. Moon­bound answers all of these ques­tions, some obliquely:

• What if the uncanny starter from Sour­dough wasn’t the story’s sub­ject, but its narrator?

• What if Jaina Mitra started a biotech com­pany that became one of the three biggest cor­po­ra­tions on Earth? What if that com­pany could (quoting from Moon­bound) “write in muscle and mito­chon­dria the way you’d jot a note with a pen”?

• What if the Unbroken Spine’s plan worked, and they really did live forever?

• What if Kat Potente’s game of Max­imum Happy Imag­i­na­tion wasn’t only a thought experiment?

(If you don’t recall Max­imum Happy Imag­i­na­tion, I quote that sec­tion of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store in the piece linked imme­di­ately below.)

A new note on influence

I’ve added a new note to my Moon­bound mini-site: another appre­ci­a­tion of a writer who influ­enced me, and the novel in turn. This fol­lows my notes on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

This time, it’s about Iain M. Banks. Many of you have read his Cul­ture novels, at least a sampling; just as many have not. I tried to make this note useful both as an intro­duc­tion and a consideration.

This time, it’s about muscular imagination.

Public service

For Bay Area neighbors, this next por­tion of the newsletter will serve as a spe­cific recommendation; for others, it will be a more abstract appre­ci­a­tion — though maybe you’ll be able to con­nect it to some place you know.

I’m an ardent booster of my little neighborhood, roughly where Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville mash together, up against the rail­road tracks, an old meat­packing dis­trict now res­i­den­tial (small single-family, sprawling condo) and indus­trial (the country’s tastiest jam, sophis­ti­cated cardboard box man­u­fac­turing machines) and intel­lec­tual (mostly biotech, including a mycelium leather lab).

Berkeley Bowl West, arguably the best gro­cery store in the country, sits along a bucolic greenway.

There are also restau­rants, of course, and one in par­tic­ular has trans­formed and enlivened the entire neighborhood. Called Good to Eat, it is the brick-and-mortar real­iza­tion of a pop-up that for many years offered Tai­wanese dumplings at a local brewery. The restau­rant is approaching its second anniversary; it has become my favorite in the entire Bay Area.

Good to Eat is the vision of Tony Tung and Angie Lin. Chef Tony is the kitchen mastermind, hon­oring and renewing classic Tai­wanese cui­sine. Angie is, among many other things, the restau­rant’s voice on Insta­gram, a foun­tain of energy and invitation. (Her record, in Insta­gram Stories, of a recent research trip to Taiwan was basi­cally a mini-documentary.)

A sign of great people is that they attract great people, and Good to Eat’s whole team sparkles. It feels most nights like there must be a camera crew perched just out of sight, filming a seg­ment for some children’s TV show, intended to model “careful work” and “cheerful collaboration” for impres­sion­able young minds.

And there is a sur­prise here. The casual, friendly ser­vice and rea­son­able (for the Bay Area) prices don’t quite pre­pare you for the food, which exhibits a level of pre­ci­sion and cre­ativity that approaches fine dining. It’s delightful to realize: all those years with the pop-up, slinging dumplings, THIS is what Chef Tony wanted to do. She had a secret plan!

Just look at this menu.

(If I was ordering today, right now, I’d get the egg­plant noodle, the golden kimchi — my favorite kimchi I’ve had any­where — the bok choy, and, yes, the fu-ru fried chicken. But this would imply NOT get­ting the red-braised pork belly with daikon radish … hmm … )

All together, it is a per­fect package: food, space, esprit de corps. Of course, it helps that Kathryn and I have known these folks since their pop-up days, and are always greeted warmly … but visit twice, and you’ll be greeted warmly, too.

Good to Eat offers the tan­gible argu­ment: enthu­siasm and care are not in short supply. They don’t need to be hoarded. They ought to burn bright, spill out onto the sidewalk.

Here’s some­thing impor­tant to understand. It is, at this time, approx­i­mately impos­sible to open and operate a restau­rant in the Bay Area. The exor­bi­tant cost of every input yields eye-popping menu prices; those prices keep cus­tomers away; the whole com­mer­cial equa­tion becomes ten­uous. There has been a wave of closures, as long­standing favorites throw in the towel.

It’s not just restau­rants. Every kind of phys­ical estab­lish­ment feels, presently, improbable. It’s so much easier to … do some­thing else. Any­thing else! Yet, it is phys­ical estab­lish­ments — storefronts and markets, cafes and restau­rants — that make cities (like the donut mega­lopolis of the Bay Area) worth inhabiting. Even the places you don’t fre­quent pro­vide tremen­dous value to you, because they draw other people out, pop­u­lating the sidewalks. They gen­erate urban life in its fun­da­mental unit, which is: the bustle.

In taking on this task — setting out their sand­wich board (you know I love a sand­wich board) and opening their doors to everyone — people like Tony and Angie pro­vide a pro­found public ser­vice.

It shouldn’t be so dif­fi­cult! And this is not just a post-pandemic thing. The Bay Area has, for decades, been a daunting place to open your doors. Many of America’s urban hubs share this over­heated deformity. It’s breath­taking to visit a country like Japan and find the most ten­uous busi­nesses (with the scantest hours) put­tering along happily … simply because the rent is so low.

The shortage of useful, flex­ible space imposes costs — opportunity costs, if you remember econ 101 — borne by all of us, not just the Tonys and Angies of the world. Maybe that’s fair pay­ment for the other gifts these places pro­vide … but I’m skeptical. We don’t know, will never know, what we’re missing, except that it’s a lot.

Anyway, this is all to say: these days, it’s a minor mir­acle when a great new restau­rant opens and stays open, so if you’re in the Bay Area, you should make haste to 65th Street in Emeryville. The patio is lovely, but/and Kathryn and I always sit at the bar. Get the kimchi. Yeah … get the fried chicken, too.

Links and recommendations

I read and loved Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes. This is serious physics, pre­sented in an exper­i­mental way, deeply lit­erary. I’m late to Rovelli — I wish I’d started reading him sooner. Now, I’m onto an ear­lier book, The Order of Time, which is like­wise captivating.

His lan­guage can be challenging; don’t let it throw you.

Here’s a note I tapped out while reading The Order of Time, indica­tive of the sort of thoughts this stuff encourages:

Rovelli. The past is only a com­plex of traces. All phys­ical. Craters in soil, mem­o­ries in brain. Stone tablets, photographs. Now imagine: mil­lions of years pass. More. All is dis­solved and smoothed over. Washed away. Did any­thing happen?

In a world truly devoid of traces — no exceptions — we have to say “no”. Nothing happened.

!!!

Of course it’s all dif­ferent if one memory survives. One slip of paper. A receipt.

This makes me wonder, in turn, about cul­ture in the ocean — an envi­ron­ment much poorer in traces. Richer in other things, but poorer in traces. What kind of minds and cul­tures does that support?

Bay Area neighbors, here’s an inter­esting event: Paul Yamazaki, long­time head book buyer at City Lights Books, has written a memoir, and he’ll dis­cuss it with Oscar Vil­lalon at the store on May 1.

Paul is a giant of bookselling, not only in the Bay Area but nationally — globally — and this promises to be a fun celebration. I’ll be there!

I’ve been enjoying the Paper Watch newsletter from Simpla Vida: con­cise, canny sum­maries of new research on human health and longevity, rated both for prac­ti­cality and interest.

This is a cool format that other pub­li­ca­tions should prob­ably steal!

Like­wise compact, but with an almost oppo­site polarity, I find myself con­sis­tently opening One Thing, a newsletter of punchy rec­om­men­da­tions.

The length is great, just a few hun­dred words. I like the edi­tions where two writers pop in together, sort of like Statler and Wal­dorf in The Muppets.

Here is a lovely dis­patch from Christo­pher Brown about his parents, and their reintro­duc­tion of con­trolled burns on wild-ish land:

The first years they burned, there were no pro­fes­sionals around who you could hire to do it safely and mas­ter­fully like the crew that was there last week. They did it themselves, with the aid of some locals they had gotten to know. My dad famously burned his eye­brows off the first time, and laughed about it. And in time, after he retired, he came to love the nat­ural wonder that burning the land yielded, a retired den­tist reading Tur­genev by the window and watching the eagles come in.

Chris’s new book, an evo­lu­tion of his newsletter, is coming later this year! It is “a genre-bending blend of nat­uralism, memoir, and social man­i­festo for rewil­ding the city, the self, and society” with a terrific, evoca­tive cover. I can’t wait. In the meantime, Field Notes remains one of my favorite newslet­ters.

I loved the 2014 movie The Guest for (1) its cen­tral per­for­mance by Dan Stevens and (2) its synth-soaked sound­track.

Here is The Guest II, sound­track to a sequel that doesn’t exist, assem­bled by the same people who made the orig­inal!

There should prob­ably be more sound­tracks to films that don’t exist, right? I am recalling Wes Anderson’s method, in his early years, of assem­bling a sound­track first, then imag­ining the movie that could con­tain all those tunes … 

Here is Spencer Chang’s documentation of his SIGIL I: a sort of amulet, warm and organic, with a dig­ital sur­prise.

I had the plea­sure of seeing and trying this in person — it was really cool!!

I love these bits of thinking and lan­guage behind the orig­inal Macintosh, as cap­tured in Dan Cohen’s newsletter:

• “the computer must be in one lump”
• “seeing the guts is taboo”
• “you get ten points if you can eliminate the power cord”

Denis Villeneueve, against dia­logue:

I will say: in a per­fect world, you should use dia­logue only when there are no other resources [ … ] It should be the last resort — that’s what I’m saying. When I say “I hate dia­logue,” it’s not true. I don’t. But it’s true that I feel, myself as a film director, unin­spired when I read 500 pages of dia­logue. For me, it’s boring.

It will not sur­prise you to learn that I disagree — in fact, I might endorse the oppo­site view: use imagery only when you cannot use dia­logue — but/and I love the sharp­ness of his opinion! No mealy “well, it depends … ” here.

I am on the side of the unrea­son­able aes­thetic judg­ment, always.

Here are some quantum com­puter researchers calmly shuffling indi­vidual atoms around. The fact that this sort of manip­u­la­tion is even the­o­ret­i­cally pos­sible, to say nothing of prac­ti­cally feasible, is a tri­umph of our civilization. Dem­ocritus would have wept … 

Here is a sweet a capella per­for­mance of Red Robin by a trio with an excel­lent name: Rufous Nightjar!

Here is a recent per­for­mance by Bleachers on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, fea­turing SUR­PRISE SAXOPHONE!

Here are some land­scapes by Jordan Belson, who was better known as an exper­i­mental filmmaker. I think these pic­tures — made from layers of papers, cut and torn — are beyond beautiful. This is exactly the kind of thing I love:

This sensitive dis­cussion about Belson is terrific. What a thing, to have a group of people who knew you and your work so well, car­rying it into the future.

Belson lived for almost sixty years (!!) in a tiny apart­ment in North Beach. He pro­duced most of his work there, including the cosmic film sequences fea­tured in The Right Stuff. The director Philip Kaufman says he has no idea how they were actu­ally made; Belson retreated to Tele­graph Hill, then reap­peared with the fin­ished sequences.

The apart­ment had one window, with a small balcony, and this view:

Here is a fun and weird review of the his­tory of liver-centrism in med­i­cine and art. One could title an album Sources in the His­tory of Hepatocentrism … 

There are a lot of movies and TV shows out there that claim to crit­i­cize power and vio­lence by … depicting power and vio­lence … and I find myself thinking: I don’t believe you! I think you sorta like power and vio­lence, which is why you put them on the screen so beautifully.

A more cred­ible cri­tique would show us another world, a new set of possibilities. Lend THAT the inevitability of great lighting and a sharp lens. Like I said in my note on Iain M. Banks: I am tired of cau­tionary tales. Give me vision.

Here is a fas­ci­nating story about the ten­sion around “pure veg” food delivery in India: apps and plat­forms vibrating against cui­sine and religion. Oof, this is deep stuff. DEEP!

Here is the reac­tion every inter­view sub­ject hopes for, or ought to: “Your answers to my last ques­tions were so fun to read that I actu­ally punched the air.”

Here’s some sharp eco­nomic analysis from Neel Kashkari, pres­i­dent of the Min­naeapolis Fed. The rich­ness of the pic­ture here, plus the sense of gen­uine curiosity, is refreshing. (I like Neel Kashkari a lot. If tech­no­cratic and demo­c­ratic sys­tems can coexist — and I think they can — the dance requires people like him.)

It’s gauche to link to yourself, but … I really am convinced, more and more, of the accu­racy of my argu­ment about the long 2010s.

Pair this with a rising pre­mo­ni­tion that the nascent 2020s (which only began in 2022) will be short. Interrupted.

By what?

Links on distribution and discovery

I appre­ci­ated this episode of the Search Engine podcast, in which the host PJ Vogt and his guest Ezra Klein wrestle with a whole load of meta media ques­tions — my favorite kind.

The premise is a simple, plain­tive ques­tion: how do I use the internet now?

The sur­prise and plea­sure of this conversation, for me, is the speed at which Ezra dis­patches the con­ven­tional wisdom around media’s recent his­tory. You’ll find a gen­uinely sur­prising, provoca­tive analysis here, with a com­po­nent that is not only eco­nomic and/or technical, but moral: a com­po­nent that insists people are more than just the pawns of algorithms, mech­a­nis­ti­cally batted around.

That’s bad news, by the way: it means people (like me) (like you) are moral actors who can and must make choices about their time and attention.

Sorry, but there’s no escaping it!

Per­haps my favorite obser­va­tion of Ezra’s was that it’s increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to gather an audi­ence from scratch, par­tic­ularly out­side the algo­rithmic mills of the apps. He’s talking about this in the con­text of news operations, but/and I think it’s true for any kind of media production.

Making some­thing — a book, a video game, a pub­li­ca­tion — is hard enough. How do you find the people who might love it? The present play­book seems to be: post a funny video some­where and pray for the breath of the gods.

Oddly, phys­ical goods have an easier time! Maybe media ought to just fade into a grand cross-subsidy. Want to start a magazine? Fine — design the merch first.

I’ve long con­sid­ered launching a newsletter intended to get new projects their first hun­dred readers, or listeners, or viewers, or whatever. I’m cog­nizant of the catch-22: how would THAT newsletter build an audi­ence? I think the premise of a pub­li­ca­tion for people who are hungry to explore — who want to get out on the edge of the new — has some juice. The crisp and con­cise 4Columns offers a simple template, though it (1) has no dis­cernible busi­ness model, and (2) is too devoted to the New York art scene to really speak to a global Anglo­phone audi­ence, or at least, to me.

I do not actu­ally “have time” to write another newsletter and I haven’t designed any merch, so this remains entirely theoretical. However, the same impulse exactly keeps these sec­tions of links and rec­om­men­da­tions so big; I still feel the blog­ging spirit within me, which isn’t only “look at this!” but also always “give it a chance!”

Here’s Kyle Chayka attacking the same theme in a recent edi­tion of One Thing.

Links on dreaming and takeoff

Here’s Claire L. Evans, in a newsletter dis­patch about lucid dreaming:

As the philoso­pher Eric Schwitzgebel writes, “perhaps dream-objects and dream-events are sim­ilar to fic­tional objects and events, or to the images evoked by fic­tion, in having, typically, a cer­tain inde­ter­mi­nacy of color, nei­ther cerise nor taupe nor burnt umber, nor gray either.” Is fic­tion in black and white? A ques­tion for another night.

Fuel for my argu­ment — you’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it now — that novels are best under­stood as pack­aged dreams.

As a journalist, Claire is wide-ranging, boundary-busting, super-productive. It’s well worth subscribing to her newsletter, even if only as an index to her work across pub­li­ca­tions.

Here’s another brain-bending edi­tion, about the depic­tion of the scin­til­lating scotoma — a common migraine symptom — in art. Gah, it’s just terrific.

Maybe the lines above struck me because I’ve been thinking (again) (endlessly) about that fab­u­lous phase change, when fic­tion goes from reading to dreaming.

“Suspension of disbelief” is really apt, because it feels like lifting off. A sudden drop in friction. Floating. Flying.

I was most aware of the phase change as a young person, a novice reader. I remember being very conscious, sometimes, that it was NOT happening; that my wheels were just bumping along the runway. I remember giving up.

There are plenty of adult readers who rarely, or never, take flight. This isn’t nec­es­sarily a bad thing. It just means they read a dif­ferent way. Enjoy dif­ferent things.

Like­wise, there are readers who jet along at a speed I can’t quite imagine. Their unit of recog­ni­tion isn’t the phrase or the para­graph but some­thing close to the page. They read in great gulps, like baleen whales devouring whole regions of ocean. I believe this kind of reader is most often found deep in genre, where a cer­tain for­malism reigns: “I see what you’re doing here. Yes. Okay. Yes.”

Of course, every read­erly alti­tude is a collaboration: the fuel must match the engine. Lately, I’ve found a sur­prising number of novels incom­pat­ible with my own per­sonal vehicle. Just to name names — and I can do this safely, because the book was a cel­e­brated hit — some­thing in Birnam Wood was, for me, almost unintelligible. Three pages, five, twenty, and I was glued to the ground. The words remained stubbornly: words. Isn’t that odd?

Here’s another approach to the same feeling.

The Tour­na­ment of Books came and went between edi­tions of this newsletter, the year’s great crit­ical jamboree. (Why haven’t any of the “big” book awards taken the hint and become this fun?) Right at the start, a judg­ment by Rufi Thorpe injected some delightful new lan­guage into the blood­stream of the tour­na­ment and, maybe, lit­erary lingo broadly.

Considering the novels before her, Judge Thorpe offered a com­pelling rubric including dimen­sions such as

Characters: I know it’s not pop­ular to say, but I want to like the fucking characters. I can’t be rolling my eyes every other page at their weenie-ish ways.

and

Gay: I just like gay things better, I don’t stand behind it, I just happen to like gay things more.

Some dimen­sions were posed as ques­tions, such as

Does it vibrate strangely? This is the most inef­fable category, but also the most impor­tant to me. Is the work so sin­gu­larly itself that it has tran­scended in some way?

and, crit­ically,

Is it drugs? Did I lose con­scious­ness while reading it? I’m still chasing the absolute nar­cotic of the Sweet Valley High books.

There it is: dreaming by another name.

Reading the judg­ment, it was delightful and illu­mi­nating to see Judge Thorpe apply this rubric to the books under consideration. Even more delightful was the way her lan­guage infected the whole Tour­na­ment of Books. “Is it drugs?” became THE recur­ring ques­tion.

In his com­men­tary on this judg­ment, Kevin Guil­foyle wrote:

I cheered when Judge Thorpe made the comment, “I’m still chasing the absolute nar­cotic of the Sweet Valley High books.” Over the last 20 years of these commentaries, I’ve devel­oped a theory of reading that sug­gests we are con­stantly trying to repli­cate the expe­ri­ence we had when we first fell in love with books. For me it was prob­ably The Three Inves­ti­ga­tors novels, and then Tolkien when I was just a little bit older. There is this sort of trance you fall into when that sense memory gets triggered. I love that Judge Thorpe gives it a name: drugs. Exactly right.

Even more than selling me on any of the books under consideration, this judg­ment sold me on Rufi Thorpe. I must read more! She has a new novel out in June: Margo’s Got Money Troubles.

This edi­tion’s art is the work of Emile-Allain Séguy. If you have never fol­lowed a link to browse the archive of an artist I’ve fea­tured here: follow this one!! There is some­thing absolutely atem­poral about these patterns; they could have been designed yesterday.

I dis­cov­ered Emile-Allain Séguy back in December, designing the most recent Fat Gold magnet. For that, I chose one of his more abstract geometries; it has an almost Mem­phis vibe, doesn’t it?

It’s time to pre­order Moon­bound, if you haven’t already! Remember, for­ward your order con­fir­ma­tion email to pre­order@robinsloan.com and I’ll send you a copy of the limited-edi­tion zine in May.

From Oakland, just down the street from Good to Eat,

Robin

P.S. The pace of these newslet­ters will now increase — June is fast approaching, and there is a lot to talk about! You’ll receive my next newsletter in mid-April.

March 2024