The plunge

A new novel is drafted and sold; it will be pub­lished in the U.S. by MCD, who brought you Sour­dough and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

More on that later in the newsletter. I have other things I want to talk about first, but it felt too sneaky not to lead with the good news!

Tide report

I’ve been swim­ming! Kathryn and I were inspired by our friends to buy thermal wetsuits. “You stay toasty warm!” they told us, and I didn’t quite believe them, but now it’s me saying it: you stay toasty warm!

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 18 years now — that number sure did sneak up — and I would have told you I know it well, have ranged its whole cir­cum­fer­ence and built for myself an expansive, inte­grated view. Yes, I had been nearly every­where in this bustling donut megacity; but it IS a donut, truly; and what does that imply? This Area has a hole for a heart, and I had never once been swim­ming in the Bay.

We go a few times a week; it’s a short drive to the beach, where the water runs chest-high for a kilometer, easy. The tides dic­tate our swims. We watch the moon; suddenly, its phases have teeth. That’s pretty fun.

And: isn’t this tide book gorgeous? What a plea­sure to flip to a new week and let these charts tell you what you’ll be doing, and when.

During an evening swim through big, slow swells, I floated on my back and peered across at San Fran­cisco; the sun was sinking directly behind the city. All I could see was the water — dark, nearly black, the way it gets at that time of day — and the scal­loped top of the city’s sil­hou­ette, like a floating citadel. Atlantean, in that light. I had the thought, simply: I’ve never looked at San Fran­cisco this way!

Two decades living in a place, and there is still, always, some­thing new to discover.

Two decades thinking about a place, and there is still, always, a new angle to find!

(In case it’s not clear: this is, for Bay Area sub­scribers, a full-throated rec­om­mendation. I’ll add that a great unex­pected ben­efit of the wetsuit, besides toasty-warmness, is the buoy­ancy it provides. I have his­tor­i­cally been a terrible, and there­fore fearful, swimmer; the little extra lift has been a great aid to prac­tice and improvement.)

Electric eel

My pub­lisher MCD is cel­e­brating its fifth anniversary; here, Sean McDonald marks the occasion. I want to high­light this line:

 … an abiding sense of gen­erosity and com­mu­nity that would help the whole MCD list feel like an organic whole.

because it’s what makes MCD feel spe­cial to me: the sense of being “labelmates” with these other authors.

I feel totally “at home” on the MCD list with Dan Bouk and his forth­coming Democracy’s Data; with Brian Mer­chant and Claire L. Evans and their forth­coming Terraform; with Tamara Shopsin and her LaserWriter II, which you know I loved. The list goes on; I could cite nearly every book pub­lished by MCD in the past five years, and a bunch yet to come. Alexis Madrigal wrote a book for MCD!

It’s a rare-ish feeling these days; I haven’t encoun­tered too many authors who would say the same thing about their pub­lisher or imprint. Even when they feel extremely well-treated, there is not this sense of coher­ence and affinity.

Avid readers know FSG’s logo, with its three sturdy fishes. Five years in, I remain enchanted with the evo­lu­tion embedded in MCD’s mascot: the elec­tric eel.

Doing the damn thing

While we’re on the sub­ject of pub­lishing and conviviality, I want to take a moment to rec­og­nize Eliot Peper.

Eliot has a new novel out this week, titled Reap3r, a gleaming near-future thriller in the tra­di­tion of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and P. W. Singer/­August Cole. This is Eliot’s TENTH novel; he is the absolute model of get­ting out of your own way and doing the damn thing.

Eliot is also a notably great con­trib­utor to the writing and pub­lishing com­mu­nity: con­stantly hyping other people up, always making connections. If an Eliot Peper novel is a canny syn­thesis of new tech­nology set against far-flung locales, then Eliot him­self is also a syn­the­sizer of people and projects — a pow­erful integrator.

I strongly rec­om­mend his newsletter, which arrives (unlike … some … others) on a reg­ular cadence with a focused set of book recs and links of interest.

For the lab newsletter, I wrote some notes about Twitter. If you are, or were, a user of the platform, you might find them inter­esting, even convincing.

Since I last wrote, we’ve added our fresh 2021 oil to the Fat Gold online shop! You would absolutely not be sad to have both of these vari­eties at hand in your kitchen.

I’ll also point you, again, to our com­pre­hen­sive Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil, simply because I’m so proud of it 😇

Omar Rizwan’s essay on page 100 of this PDF zine/journal, titled “Against text”, is hugely provoca­tive; in fact, I’d say it’s a must-read for anyone working on dig­ital media, new interactions, things like that.

I mean, to be clear: it’s so provoca­tive it makes me itch! I sort of hate it! Evi­dence it is exactly the kind of argu­ment I ought to be chewing on!

Coleen Baik has, over the past couple of years, taught her­self the art of hand-drawn animation. She’s just released a new short, and, even though I’ve been following along with her progress, I was hon­estly not pre­pared for the level of mas­tery it demonstrates.

Here is Coleen’s ani­mated short about care and love, pro­duced with care and love.

Here is Tom Armitage on cycling: an enlivening, inspiring post that res­onates on the same fre­quency as my bay swim­ming expe­ri­ence.

There’s always some­thing new to discover, and when that “some­thing new” has the ben­efit of luring you reli­ably out of the house … at 42, it’s a helpful combination.

Quanta Mag­a­zine won the Pulitzer Prize for Explana­tory Reporting. I was delighted to see this recognition, with its “notably Natalie Wolchover”. Quanta, generally, is my favorite pub­li­ca­tion on the whole internet; Natalie, spe­cifically, is my favorite sci­ence writer working today. What a mind to have on your side!

I decided recently that I was way overdue reading Frankenstein. This free audio­book ver­sion by Caden Vaughn Clegg is fabulous, and, holy shit, what a book! The voices of its nar­ra­tors (the mon­ster among them) pierce through 200 years like a laser beam: as vivid and romantic, in the old sense, as the day the novel arrived. (Also, I was truly not pre­pared for the moment when you find your­self FOUR FRAME STO­RIES DEEP … )

Here are the columns by quantum physi­cist John G. Cramer for Analog magazine, 1984-2022 and ongoing, pro­duced expressly for writers of sci­ence fiction: encap­su­la­tions of cutting-edge ideas, offered as fuel for their imaginings.

THAT, my friends, is a good old-fashioned web page.

I dis­cov­ered the columns after watching this presentation, pre­cisely the kind of low view-count trea­sure that I love to find on YouTube. Here’s a line I jotted down:

Causality isn’t really a boundary condition. It’s sort of a prejudice; an observation.

Does your city have wheel people? The ones riding their neat little monowheels, wrapped in bub­bles of pure Jet­sons futurity? The sil­hou­ette of a place does change; slow, then fast.

I love to see these fig­ures whizzing along, leaning into the wind.

Here is a rousing assess­ment of the pos­sible future of this planet’s economy from Deb Chachra. One para­graph in par­tic­ular rewired my brain a little; I have found myself returning to this insight (emphasis mine):

We mostly only close mate­rials loops when it’s “economically viable” to do so. By and large, what that means is that it takes less energy to recycle the mate­rial than it does to create it in the first place, which is true for aluminum, steel, and glass, but not for mate­rials like plas­tics or concrete. But the promise of access to renew­able energy is that it changes this equation, putting processes that are intrin­si­cally energy-intensive, like recov­ering the carbon from plas­tics for reuse or desali­nating sea­water to make it potable, on the table. It doesn’t matter how much energy a process needs if it is inexpensive, doesn’t limit the energy avail­able to others for their use, and is non-polluting. There’s a vir­tuous circle here too: the faster that renew­able energy sys­tems are up and running, and the closer we can get to achieving this potential, the more that we can apply that clean energy to repur­posing the mate­rials of our cur­rent tech­no­log­ical sys­tems to build out the phys­ical infra­struc­tures of our new ones. Not beating swords into plowshares, but recy­cling cars into elec­tric trams. We live on a sun-drenched blue marble hanging in space, and for all that we per­sist in believing it’s the other way around, that means we have access to finite resources of matter but unlim­ited energy. We can learn to act accordingly.

We can have it if we want it.

The other minds combo pack

I read these books back-to-back and they made a pow­erful pairing. Ways of Being is just out from FSG; The Moun­tain in the Sea is forth­coming from MCD. I feel like they ought to sell them together in a little slipcase.

Ways of Being is aston­ishing in its breadth, the cross-disciplinary range of James’s explorations; it had me jot­ting notes every three pages. Here’s one:

A com­pelling thought from Bridle, page 239:

Evo­lu­tion com­prises many processes — natural selec­tion and ran­dom­ness among them. In more com­plex ani­mals, ran­dom­ness is suppressed, because there are so many inter­de­pen­dent processes in these com­plex bodies. But in “simpler” forms, ran­dom­ness can flourish.

Slime molds and radiolara — they just VIBE OUT. Like a gen­er­a­tive art project.

This is one of those books that, reading it, you swear you can feel the elec­tricity tin­gling across the sur­face of your brain.

The Moun­tain in the Sea, meanwhile, is the most exciting novel I have read this year; maybe in the past few years. Long­time sub­scribers know how impor­tant early-2000s William Gibson was to me. In this novel, Ray Nayler Does That Thing, Recognizably, but/and the book’s polar­i­ties and pri­or­i­ties are different, because it’s 2022, not 2002. There is, for starters, more LIFE in this book than in any of Gibson’s — life of many kinds, and correspondingly, minds of many kinds.

That can be tricky ter­rain for fiction; I have often encoun­tered tran­scrip­tions of ~other kinds of minds~ that are impres­sive technically, but not actu­ally fun or inter­esting to read. In this book, again and again, Ray Nayler gets it just right; an impres­sive feat of sci-fi cal­i­bra­tion and pop fluency.

On top of every­thing else, The Moun­tain in the Sea fea­tures my favorite vil­lain in recent memory. As a writer, I found the depic­tion of this char­acter legit­i­mately inspiring; I took notes.

The other other minds combo pack

Those books, together, reminded me of two more that I read a while back and have con­tinued to think about in the months since:

It will not sur­prise you to hear that The Cul­tural Lives of Whales and Dolphins is eye-poppingly fascinating. It has the added ben­efit of being written in a reg­ister that I as­so­ciate with the very best, most serious field scientists. The book is about whales and dolphins, but/and I found it an hon­estly thrilling account of clear human thought.

What Would Ani­mals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? is as playful and pro­found as its title — and what a title! Vin­ciane Despret insists, throughout, on the value of anecdote, and the neces­sity of encoun­tering ani­mals in their own world. Lab­o­ra­tory experiments, for all their sup­posed rigor, simply can’t tell us the things we want to know about crea­tures that live in, and through, the world outside.

In a world as vast as this one, Vin­ciane Despret insists, seeing some­thing once actu­ally counts for a lot.

I loved her voice, which is to say, Brett Buchanan’s ren­di­tion of it; he includes lots of little trans­la­tion notes that are inter­esting, even funny, in their own right.

All along

2020 was a pow­erful year for: if you want to do it, better do it now.

There was a book I wanted very badly to write; a book I had been making notes toward for nearly ten years. (In my database, the ear­liest one is dated December 13, 2013.) I had not, however, set down a single word of prose. Of course I hadn’t! Many of you will rec­og­nize this feeling: your “best” ideas are the ones you are most reluc­tant to realize, because the instant you begin, they will drop out of the smooth hyper­space of abstraction, appa­rate right into the asteroid field of real work.

In the first week of 2021, I drove with two sacks of gro­ceries to a rented cabin near Joshua Tree. There, I began at last, and I loved what emerged; loved the feeling of finally choosing spe­cific words for this vision. So, I kept going, and, in Sep­tember 2021, sent a first very rough draft to my agent, Sarah Burnes. Ear­lier this year, we sent a man­u­script to Sean McDonald at MCD, and now, we are going to pub­lish this book together.

You’ll have to for­give me for keeping my cloaking device engaged here; it’s not time to lay out the book’s par­tic­ulars, or even reveal its title. There is tons of work still to be done. The expe­ri­ence of pub­lishing two novels, seeing the ways they find their readers, has taught me a mea­sure of patience; we will be talking about this book, and its world, in this newsletter for a long time.

And anyway, there are clues, tons of them, in past editions; clues even in this one. How could there not be? This is the book I have been thinking about all along.

Lots more to come this year; a cre­ative tide is rolling in.

From the water, where it runs chest-high,

Robin

May 2022