Moonbound!

The title of my new novel, coming in June 2024 from MCD×FSG, is:

Moon­bound: The Last Book of the Anth

I’ve just cre­ated a mini-site that will col­lect every­thing I write about the project. Currently, the vibe is “public notebook”. By the time of publication, that might mature into “glossy pamphlet” … or it might not. We’ll find out together.

Leading the way, you’ll find the first clues about the novel’s content. Also noteworthy: I intend this book as the first in a trilogy. Here’s 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 November 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

That’s plenty to read already, so I’ll keep the rest of this edi­tion fairly short. Below, you’ll find my notes on the season. The next newsletter you receive, in mid-November, will be my 2023 gift guide.

The season of mass

The Fat Gold har­vest has com­menced in earnest, this year with a new machine at our side. There it is, pic­tured above: small by the stan­dards of global olive oil production, titanic by the stan­dards of Sloan.

Other parts of the year are, for me, sea­sons of energy, which is to say, pat­terned light: pixels and symbols. That’s the domain of my career, and of my tem­pera­ment, mostly. But this period, October through December, is the season of mass: bulky bins of olives chore­o­graphed into the crusher.

These days, we do it five tons at a time.

Both sea­sons are impor­tant to me, and one has informed the other. I’ve learned things making olive oil (and oper­ating this new machine) that I couldn’t have learned any other way. And, because my ten­dency is toward the symbolic, it’s healthy to have this coun­ter­vailing force. Big trucks, slick floors, tired muscles … all good things.

The timing this year was fortuitous, even a bit spooky: Moon­bound was fully locked just as the first olives rolled. So, rather than feeling torn between responsibilities, I have enjoyed the sat­is­fac­tion of a super clean gear shift.

Of course, tem­pera­ment can’t totally be tamed. While I’m oper­ating this new machine (feeling like a Star Trek character, tending the warp core) I am also thinking, thinking, thinking … and, as always, making notes.

Notes toward what?

Back in 2021, in the first week of Jan­uary, at a rented cabin in Joshua Tree, I wrote the first pages of Moon­bound. In the first week of Jan­uary 2024, at a loca­tion to be determined, I’ll shift gears again, and begin the second book in my notional trilogy.

The factory floor

California’s San Joaquin Valley is best under­stood as a giant, open-air fac­tory floor. I don’t mean that in any pejo­ra­tive sense; rather, the opposite: this might be the world’s biggest, most pro­duc­tive fac­tory. My point is simply that it’s totally engineered, densely woven with infrastucture.

It’s amazing, in this season, to see the trucks con­stantly rolling, pulling gon­dola trailers brim­ming over with toma­toes or almonds, bound for humon­gous pro­cessing facilities. Nothing is inde­pen­dent here: every one of these oper­a­tions relies on a thick web of cap­ital (machines) and capa­bility (people who can fix the machines).

My work with Fat Gold has been a ter­rific edu­ca­tion in all the tech­nolo­gies that make this place possible. The wheel gets a lot of credit — and sure, wheels are handy — but more and more, I think the key to human civ­i­liza­tion is prob­ably: the pump.

Dri­ving around the valley at this time of year, you see dust devils con­stantly. Glance across any open field, and there they’ll be, a whole gang of djinns, whirling merrily. Some­times they’re pretty big.

The realization: dust devils are spin­ning everywhere, all the time. Here, in the dry rem­nant of har­vest, their con­tours become reli­ably visible. Elsewhere, glimpses are rare; you might catch one in a Target parking lot, dancing with a piece of trash. But just because you don’t see a dust devil on the tidy side­walk in front of your apart­ment building doesn’t mean it’s not there. It IS there! It’s whirling merrily — just a clear twist of air.

The magic is ubiquitous, and mostly invisible.

There are lots of star­lings in the San Joaquin Valley, and in the morn­ings they fly in their won­derful mur­mu­ra­tions, strange shadowy forms bil­lowing above the Home Depot parking lot.

Watching them, I had the thought: a star­ling only knows a mur­mu­ra­tion from the inside — a scrum of dark feathers, the bird beside them breathing hard. They can’t see or under­stand the larger object.

There are metaphors avail­able there. But there’s also a playful possibility:

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one star­ling gets to watch. Maybe, every morning, a single bird is chosen to sit it out, and regard, with wonder and sat­is­fac­tion, their own species.

Stranger things have happened.

This reminds me of Vin­ciane Despret’s book titled What Would Ani­mals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, which I have, since reading, basi­cally never stopped thinking about.

One of Vin­ciane’s core argu­ments is that animal behavior is, and must remain forever, fun­da­men­tally mysterious, for the fol­lowing reasons:

• No animal behaves nor­mally in a lab or a zoo. This should be self-evident; would YOU behave nor­mally in a lab or a zoo?

• The world is vast — unimaginably so — and sci­en­tists cannot watch it all.

It fol­lows simply, inescapably: ani­mals do things that we have never seen, and will never see. Maybe it’s because they do those things cautiously, privately; or maybe it’s just because the world is vast, and they do them, just by chance, when nobody is looking. Odds are good, because usually, nobody is looking.

If you are inter­ested in animal behavior, and the real lives of all the crea­tures on this planet, I strongly rec­om­mend What Would Ani­mals Say? — it’s smart and provoca­tive and, above all, very wise. A great trans­la­tion by Brett Buchanan, too.

Another book I think about often is Breaking Bread with the Dead, by Alan Jacobs. One of the con­cepts Alan cul­ti­vates is “tem­poral band­width”, a term cribbed from Thomas Pynchon, who defined it as

the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your band­width, the more solid your persona. But the nar­rower your sense of Now, the more ten­uous you are.

I think this is so right, and so wise.

I can’t remember if Alan says this in his book, but I have often thought: your tem­poral band­width ought to get thicker as you get older. You ought to expand in both directions: matching a curious, capa­cious interest in the past (including the deep past) to an energized, respon­sible interest in the future (including the far future).

I think both directions, and the bal­ance between them, are impor­tant. If you expand in only one direction, you become distended, distorted. This produces, for example, the leaden dude obsessed with the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks.

It’s okay to inhabit a thin layer of time, the sliver of Now, when you’re young. In fact, I think it’s prob­ably healthy. But then, pretty early in adulthood, you ought to begin your expansion. It is an obligation, I think — as a citizen, and as a human.

I sup­pose it will be no sur­prise to dis­cover that Moon­bound, a book set eleven thou­sand years in the future, has a lot to say about tem­poral band­width.

I love the Eng­lish words with a silent K: knuckle, knife, knead. Knit, knot, knack.

Knight!

The com­bi­na­tion kn- used to be pronounced fully, but over time, the sound of the K soft­ened and fell away. Yet a shadow remains, there in the shape of the words, with K’s prongs leading the charge. Maybe I’m forcing it, but, to me, the mean­ings of these words all orbit a core of … aggression? Lots of pushing and poking. A sense of sharp­ness.

Know, knowledge — there’s sharp­ness there, too. Don’t you think so?

Ety­molo­gies are great bol­sters for tem­poral band­width, by the way. One by one, they reveal the total strange­ness and contingency, not to men­tion the recency, of the very lan­guage we speak.

The art in this edi­tion is drawn from a col­lection of studies by Charles Her­bert Moore, the con­trail of an artist abroad in the world, taking note of inter­esting designs and details, trying them on for size. Delving the depths of dig­ital archives, you come across a lot of mate­rial like this, and often I find it more com­pelling than the “real” artwork.

Beau­tiful fragments, oddly placed on the page.

I’m very happy to have pub­lished the first ver­sion of my Moon­bound mini-site, and it will only grow as we approach June 2024. Ultimately, I’d like the site to serve as a sort of dig­ital appendix to the novel, in the spirit of J. R. R. Tolkien’s won­derful (humon­gous) appen­dices to The Return of the King.

Okay! I’m going to send this newsletter, then go operate an olive mill.

From Fresno,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter around November 15 — the 2023 gift guide!

November 2023