Lit up like a sparkler

The days are get­ting long; somehow, this is always a surprise.

Below, you’ll find a newsletter packed with rec­om­men­da­tions, links, and stray thoughts. As always, my inten­tion is not for you to process every­thing — just pursue the two or three items that catch your eye.

Of course, if it’s me reading a newsletter like this, I open up a merry parade of thirty tabs … but that’s just me.

Here we go!

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

I’ve linked to Jack Cheng’s newsletter sev­eral times in the past, but I don’t know if I’ve ever men­tioned that Jack and I went to the same high school, just a couple of years apart, or that we’ve fol­lowed sim­ilar paths — tech jobs to crowd­funded novels to writing careers. He is a fellow trav­eler along sev­eral dimensions.

That’s all to say, I was excited to learn that his new novel is nearly here! In his latest newsletter, Jack talks a bit about the book’s milieu, and coins a com­pelling new phrase.

Here in my house­hold, we have recently become devoted to Proxy Coffee, specif­i­cally their Omen blend, which is billed as a “dark roast”, but … well, I’m not enough of a coffee nerd to really pin­point this, but it is def­i­nitely not the same dark roast that I have learned to avoid in cafes and truck stops. If you have his­tor­i­cally been sus­pi­cious of dark roasts, or if you live in a house­hold riven between roast preferences, give this one a try. “Omen” is a good name, because it’s truly revelatory.

Don’t worry if you don’t drink coffee … I’ve got you covered.

For years, visits to my friends Dafna and Jesse’s house have con­cluded with cups of their house blend tea. Some­times they even send us home with a little jar of it — a pre­cious commodity, quickly depleted.

Now, that tea is avail­able to everyone. It’s decep­tively simple, made from chamomile flowers and sage leaves, all fresh and organic. I’m telling you, though: this is the one. This is the tea.

While you’re vis­iting the INNA Jam web­site, don’t miss the strange and seduc­tive super spicy ginger snacks, which Eater recently declared the world’s best snack for ginger lovers.

Jesse is, of course, my Cotton Mod­ules bandmate, the com­poser and pro­ducer respon­sible for the com­pelling sound of The Greatest Remaining Hits. It’s all connected!

Passionate uncertainty

Here is a post about Cleopatra from Bret C. Devereaux, notable for its dis­ci­plined uncertainty. Not just dis­ci­plined: pas­sionate! That’s not a feeling gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with uncertainty, right? Yet here it’s plain.

Recently, I reread a bit of Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, and I was struck by a ver­sion of the same feeling:

[ … ] Yet such an agnostic stance is not based on disinterest. It is founded on a pas­sionate recog­ni­tion that I do not know. It con­fronts the enor­mity of having been born instead of reaching for the con­so­la­tion of a belief. It strips away, layer by layer, the views that con­ceal the mys­tery of being here — either by affirming it as some­thing or denying it as nothing.

There’s a way in which the modern media environment — maybe all media envi­ron­ments ever — pushes against “I don’t know”. In an interview, any kind, it’s weirdly dif­fi­cult to say “I don’t know” and leave it at that. The state­ment hangs in the air … the pres­sure builds … and the words come — any words, really, a haze of well-maybes and if-thens to fill the silence. If you haven’t noticed this before, listen for it; it’s ubiquitous, and sort of darkly hilarious.

I am trying to be better, when it’s appropriate, at starting and fin­ishing with “I don’t know”. I aim to become a world champion.

Miwa Messer is a long­time book­selling force at Barnes & Noble who, for the past two years, has been the mind and voice behind its Poured Over podcast. Lis­tening to a recent episode, I was struck again by her nearly incan­des­cent enthusiasm.

I have been its ben­e­fi­ciary before: Miwa was a great ally to Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store and Sour­dough and, honestly, her sup­port of both books was pivotal. The fact that I have a new book on the way, am sit­ting here typing this newsletter for you, owes more than a little to her work.

It’s amazing the dif­fer­ence one person can make, standing in the right place, lit up like a sparkler.

Here is another chapter in the love story between graph paper and video games, this one revealing the classic Street Fighter II sprites dis­as­sem­bled and packed like Ikea furniture.

I love the pencil sketches — per­fectly analog, yet totally informed by their dig­ital destination:

This pas­sage is wonderful:

In order to make the best use of the capacity we had, we wrote the ROM’s capacity on a [paper] board, and cut and paste the pixel char­ac­ters on the board.

If there was space left on the board, then there was open capacity in the ROM. So, from there we started filling in the spaces, like a puzzle.

One thing that hap­pened that’s kinda inter­esting, we saved making the ending for last, and by the time we got there we were all out of capacity. We were won­dering what to do, when we found a board that had gone missing under a desk.

We called it the “miraculous memory”.

Here is Kyle Chayka’s dream of a per­sonal machine, a wistful vision built on a beau­tiful foun­da­tion of aes­thetic references.

I replied to Kyle and told him the “per­sonal machine” I would add to his con­stel­la­tion is Penny’s book from Inspector Gadget — an object deeply cov­eted in my youth.

Here is a mini-manifesto that pairs per­fectly — maybe eerily — with Kyle’s newsletter: The Com­puter is a Feeling.

I love fol­lowing the blog of Hiroko Shimamura, who trans­lated Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store and Sour­dough into Japanese for Tokyo Sogensha. In her latest post—read with the aid of Google Translate, what a gift — she dis­cusses a series of crime novels she’s been translating. Hiroko writes:

It’s a com­ment that makes me want to tell [the author], “I can feel your thoughts even in Japan!” [ … ] I intend to do every­thing I can as a trans­lator so that I can con­tinue to pub­lish as many Japanese ver­sions as pos­sible for a long time.

“I can feel your thoughts even in Japan!” Maybe there’s a note of machine trans­la­tion in that phrase; regardless, it’s beau­tiful. We all do our part, writers and readers and pub­lishers, but/and there’s nobody more impor­tant than the trans­lators.

I enjoyed this celebration by Alexander Wells of the global Englisch of Berlin. What a language! What a world.

The breath of the gods

Here in the haunted 21st century, a random book rec­om­men­da­tion gets picked up by Twitter’s algo­rithm and launches the object of its affec­tion skyward. Last month, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s ter­rific epis­to­lary sci-fi novel This Is How You Lose the Time War was briefly the best-selling book on Amazon. It also arrived, four years after ini­tial publication, on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Here is Max’s rec­ol­lec­tion of the sur­real event, which is how I learned about it.

This is a good thing hap­pening to a great book and better people — but/and, there’s some­thing unset­tling about these algo­rithmic light­ning bolts. From afar, watching the flash, it feels like the activity of a clas­sical god. The algo­rithm’s choices are exactly that consequential; exactly that capricious.

It’s inter­esting to notice how often the dig­ital, so much more than the physical, feels irrational, unknowable, haunted. Flashes from the mountaintop. The breath of the gods.

Here’s a tren­chant obser­va­tion from Car­o­line Polachek:

Here’s the thing with men­tor­ship gen­er­ally: The land­scape of how people con­sume music changes dras­ti­cally every five years. So what advice, really, does one gen­er­a­tion have to give to the next? Very little. Dis­cov­ering your­self is the only thing that can be taught in that way. Because every gen­er­a­tion and microgen­er­a­tion has to rewrite the rules and come up with new ways of nav­i­gating and cre­ating meaning — in a way that pre­vious gen­er­a­tions not only can’t advise on but maybe even can’t under­stand. So we have to stay kind of humble here as well. Like, I don’t think I can actu­ally adver­tise myself as a mentor. What the fuck would I say, start a band and go on tour for 10 years? You can’t even afford to do that now.

Here is a suc­cessful indie video game devel­oper explaining their mar­keting strategy, built entirely around describing their game to Twitch and YouTube streamers in a way that will entice them to play it on camera.

This feels totally dizzying to me — THAT’s how you market some­thing in the 21st century? — which just proves Car­o­line Polachek’s point above.

The devel­oper explains that their out­reach to “traditional” web­sites was almost totally unsuc­cessful. Some­thing is hap­pening, with glacial implacability, across media: an all-over col­lapse in reviewing, par­tic­u­larly of work that’s inde­pen­dent and/or experimental, its cre­ators not already famous. The cir­cuits that once car­ried new work into the world are going dark.

In their place: the breath of the gods! The algo­rithms!

Here is Adam Savage at the Amer­ican Book­binding Museum! It warms my heart to see him exploring one of San Fran­cisco’s quiet gems. If you visit, you will realize, or remember, that books are machines, and there’s much more to a great printed book than the words on the page.

In another video, Adam learns about an appa­ratus in the museum’s col­lection that offers the reminder: most things that get printed aren’t books. Indeed, books are a rel­a­tively small and unimpor­tant region of the vast country of print. I sup­pose you could find this deflating; I think it’s great.

For anyone inter­ested in books and reading on the World Wide Web, it’s worth spending some time with Make Some­thing Wonderful, the new com­pendium pre­sented by the Steve Jobs Archive.

I say that not because I’m sure it’s an exem­plary “web book”, but rather because it’s very clearly trying to be, and the people who pro­duced it are very smart, so it becomes worth asking: in what ways does this succeed? In what ways does it fail?

This project is very close to the state of the art, both tech­ni­cally and aes­thetically, which pro­vides a useful oppor­tu­nity to assess that state.

Here is the story of how the U.S. elec­tricity grid was born, from the excel­lent Con­truc­tion Physics newsletter.

Here is a sat­is­fying thread of real places and devices that shine like some­thing out of sci­ence fiction.

Here is Alanna Okun writing about the ways in which pro­gram­ming is like crocheting. You know I’m wild for analo­gies that recon­nect com­puters to their tex­tile roots.

Here is Nick Cave describing a salient scene:

I remember waiting in the dark­ened venue for [the band] to come on, bummed out about England, lis­tening to some ambient music wafting out of the speakers, when sud­denly and without warning The Pop Group strode onto stage and ploughed into the opening song with such indomitable force and such sudden vis­ceral rage that I could barely breathe. It was the most exciting and fero­cious con­cert of my young life — every­thing changed at that moment and we, as a fledg­ling band, knew then what we needed to do.

What an image! Striding, ploughing! What would it mean for a novel to take the stage with that kind of energy?

The art and craft of the blurb

With some regularity, you’ll come across a cyn­ical assess­ment of book blurbs. Blurbs (the assess­ment goes) are cor­rupt and meaningless: nothing but friends doing favors for friends. “Everyone knows this.”

This assess­ment is wrong. For many years, I have received per­haps one blurb request a month, of which most are sent by editors, a few by authors themselves. Roughly half come from people I know, or people who know people I know; the other half have no pre­ex­isting connection.

I con­sider the requests, in all cases. My first novel ben­e­fited from one par­tic­ular pos­i­tive blurb, and I believe I will always be “paying that back”.

If I read a book and decide to offer a few words of sup­port — this isn’t a given — I con­sider the blurb form itself a kind of mini-genre, and I try to do a good job. That’s “good” in the sense of writing some­thing com­mer­cially useful to the author and pub­lisher; “good” also in the sense of writing some­thing I, as a book browser, would find com­pelling.

Here’s my blurb for The Tatami Galaxy, a Japanese novel newly trans­lated:

The team of Tomi­hiko Morimi and Emily Bal­istrieri is unbeatable: this novel vibrates with a voice that is sharp and funny, wacky and winning. It’s a per­fect slice of con­tem­po­rary Japanese pop: a tangle of fates, simul­ta­ne­ously cosmic and comic. I loved my voyage through The Tatami Galaxy.

Here’s my blurb for Hilary Zaid’s novel Forget I Told You This, forth­coming in September:

Forget I Told You This sets our high-tech world of phones and apps vibrating against the beauty and his­tory of pen and ink. Twisty and textured, rich and hyperreal, Hilary Zaid’s world is dense with mys­te­rious invitations. In fact, her novel itself is exactly such an invitation — and I’m very glad I said “yes”.

That novel will be pub­lished by Uni­ver­sity of Nebraska Press. Hilary Zaid emailed me herself, totally cold, explaining that my novels had been in her mind as she wrote this one, won­dering if I might give it a glance.

I agreed … and then my advance copy col­lected dust for sev­eral months. To be clear, it would have been fine for me to say, in the end, “Alas, I didn’t get to it.” That hap­pens all the time. But … I wasn’t quite ready to give up, because the novel’s premise had tickled my curiosity. (It involves some very nerdy calligraphy.) One quiet weekend in February, I picked it up, tore through it, and wrote my blurb.

So, listen. Obvi­ously there’s a way to do this cyn­ically. That’s true for every­thing, though! Every task, every exchange, every relationship. There is also a way to do it respectfully, with a kind of delib­erate porous­ness that opens the door to real surprises, for blurber and browser alike.

Recently, a blurb from Philip Pullman sold me instantly and totally:

Did the book live up to Pullman’s praise? No. Was it worth reading? Definitely! That feels about average for a blurb.

Take a look at Asuka Hishiki’s new book of botan­ical illustrations, Bota­niphoria: A Cab­inet of Botan­ical Curiosities, from the ter­rific Two Rivers Press in Reading, England.

I want to say “I can’t believe these are drawings”, but that’s not right, because it’s not that they look like photographs … they are some­thing else, some­thing hyper-, some­thing almost beyond seeing. Look at the tor­mented kohlrabi on page 29 and tell me you don’t want to buy this book.

(I have not yet deter­mined how to acquire Bota­niphoria in the U.S., but when I do, I’ll let you know … )

A book I have fig­ured out how to import from the U.K. is M. John Harrison’s new “anti-memoir”, which just arrived as I was writing this newsletter:

Twenty years ago, almost, I walked into the Barnes & Noble on King Street in San Fran­cisco (now replaced by a fancy bowling alley) where I dis­cov­ered a novel that sported on its cover (1) a white cat, and (2) a line of praise from Neil Gaiman:

A remark­able book — easily my favorite SF novel in the last decade, maybe longer.

On the strength of those words, I bought the novel, which is titled Light, and today I am still reading its author with devotion.

See! Blurbs matter.

Ever since the dawn of com­puters, people have been pre­dicting a new kind of media that molds itself to your “preferences” … 

You could walk into your house and [say to the] AI on your streaming platform, “Hey, I want a movie star­ring my pho­to­real avatar and Mar­ilyn Monroe’s pho­to­real avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day,” and it ren­ders a very com­pe­tent story with dia­logue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and sud­denly now you have a rom-com star­ring you that’s 90 min­utes long. So you can curate your story specif­i­cally to you.

 … and ever since the dawn of com­puters, they have been wrong!

This isn’t a matter of insuf­fi­cient technology, now reaching some crit­ical threshold. It’s a matter of nobody actu­ally wanting the product described.

[ … ] Say you want Fort­nite to be more of a horror game, right? Then you could ask the AI to ramp up the horror ele­ments of it. So again, you could curate your expe­ri­ence. I think that’s where it’s going.

The people who make these pre­dic­tions think they are con­juring some­thing pro­found or imaginative, but what’s always striking to me is their lack of imagination. Like, in addi­tion to being demon­strably wrong, this vision is just … boring … in its con­cep­tion of art, culture, desire, every­thing.

Anyway, if you hear someone describing a media future of this kind, it’s a sign you can safely ignore their opin­ions and pre­dic­tions. You know I love those con­ve­nient razors!

Profoundly great, part 1

Last night, Kathryn and I fin­ished our rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the ani­mated series that aired on Nick­elodeon between 2005 and 2008. The show is com­pact and purposeful: three sea­sons of 20 episodes each. The total number of episodes, though, is 61, because the spec­tac­ular finale required a little more screen time.

I enjoyed this viewing even more than my first, many years ago, which is saying a lot. This time, I was more aware of the unlikely admix­ture of wacky humor — the ani­ma­tion has moments that are pure Looney Tunes — with mythic depth. This show and its char­ac­ters have some­thing real to tell you, not just easy plat­i­tudes to repeat. The episode in which Guru Pathik (pictured above) takes Aang, the young Avatar, on a tour of his chakras is legit­i­mately revelatory.

The performances, too, rank as among the best in the his­tory of ani­ma­tion. Dante Basco’s Prince Zuko is one of the all-time great screen voices.

This show was a global smash, so it’s likely that many of you have watched and loved it already. If you haven’t, I really cannot rec­om­mend Avatar more highly; this is an uncom­monly coherent work of art, with a sense of whole­ness and inevitability that is van­ish­ingly rare in any medium, for any age group.

Profoundly great, part 2

Recently, I redown­loaded 80 Days, the text-forward adven­ture game released to great acclaim (including my own) in 2014. For as much as I played it back then, I left most of its ter­ri­tory unexplored, and it’s been great fun to expe­ri­ence the stories/­adven­tures/­conspiracies/­mysteries waiting down some of those paths. The game’s cir­cuit around the globe is studded with delight­fully dif­fi­cult choices, so you’re always thinking, “Next time, I’ll go that away … ”

Every­thing about 80 Days still works as well as it did in 2014: the crisp, clean visual presentation; the expan­sive game mechanics; and, of course, Meghna Jayanth’s script, the world it conjures — still the benchmark, in my estimation, for writing in video games. Meghna’s prose is novel-worthy, easily, but/and there’s a par­tic­ular sparkle and seduc­tion that goes beyond any­thing novels can do, pow­ered by her total awareness — enthusiastic embrace — of the inter­ac­tive form.

If you have never played 80 Days, it is avail­able on nearly every platform. Par­tic­u­larly for people who are per­haps more readers than gamers, this is the demon­stra­tion of what the medium has to offer.

Avatar and 80 Days both returned to my life around the same time, and the feeling I got from both encoun­ters was the same. It’s ener­gizing to look more closely at your favorites, trying to under­stand a little bit better how they succeed.

Both of these favorites are exem­plary of the kind of work I want to produce.

I send my newslet­ters when the moon is full, and WOW was it full last night. We watched it rise above the Oak­land hills, at first pale peach against a sky still light. Thirty min­utes later, it had deep­ened into the most golden moon I have ever seen in my life.

That’s it for this edition!

From Oak­land,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on July 3.

June 2023