There’s room
for everybody

Happy New Year! I have a new short story to share:

This story was com­mis­sioned by the dig­ital product studio Brand New Box as a year-end gift for their clients and friends. Back in the summer, when we framed up the project, their para­me­ters were simple:

• they are based in Lawrence, Kansas, and very enthu­si­astic about their home, so they won­dered if the story could con­nect to Lawrence; and

• their work is all about tech­nology, and they approach it with great care, so they won­dered if the story could steer clear of techno-dystopia.

It absolutely could, on both counts.

Of course, it still had to be about death.

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

Fol­lowing the process I described in a pre­vious newsletter, I deliv­ered four story sketches to the studio. Their selec­tion was swift and decisive; they chose the nerdiest one.

In late summer, I wrote and revised, waited a while, revised again. In the months that followed, Brand New Box did their thing, and just last week, I received the print edi­tion, its form a total sur­prise, delightful:

I was not going to share it in this newsletter — what, a cruel tease? — until I learned, ear­lier this week, that Brand New Box has ALSO pub­lished a web edi­tion for all to read. I hadn’t known they were going to do that; sur­prises all the way down!

With pleasure, here is In the Stacks (Maisie’s Tune). It’s a truly inter­ac­tive pre­sen­ta­tion — don’t miss the play button.

Ladies and gentlemen, the multifarious Marcin Wichary

Here is the web­site for Shift Hap­pens, the forth­coming book by Marcin Wichary about the his­tory and devel­op­ment of the keyboard.

I sus­pect some of you have encoun­tered Marcin’s work before. For those of you who haven’t, you ought to know that he is one of the web’s great humanists, his roving curiosity matched only by his deep well of capability.

His recounting of the quest for beau­tiful link underlines is a dig­ital design classic — a mon­u­ment to sweating the details.

Memorably, Marcin once translated and re-edited a Polish TV series from his youth, then rented a movie the­ater in San Fran­cisco and invited his friends to attend a single screening of the Wichary Cut. I was there; it was wonderful.

Marcin’s explo­rations all seem to suggest: maybe you can do what­ever you want.

(He has this in common with my new short story’s cen­tral character.)

I’ve enjoyed a behind-the-scenes view of Marcin’s work on Shift Hap­pens over the past sev­eral years. He has been on a voyage of dis­covery — with real archival revelations — while also keeping fixed in his mind a clear, uncom­pro­mising vision of the print arti­fact he wants to create. At last, that arti­fact is here. A pre-order Kick­starter launches in Feb­ruary; I’ll cir­cu­late a link at that time.

There’s a page on the web­site titled simply My book and what it means to me; it’s both a beau­tiful reflec­tion and a com­pelling invi­ta­tion, and it’s got me won­dering if per­haps every author ought to pro­duce a page of this kind. Maybe I’ll make one for my forth­coming novel. I know what it would say.

Here is the real-life inspi­ra­tion for my new short story: the Big Red Synthesizer.

I ripped this video from (my own account on) Instagram, so if you are a user of that platform, it might be more pleasant to watch it over there.

That trip to Lawrence was very memorable. The Raven Book Store, the Lawrence Public Library, the Big Red Synth … what’s not to love??

Here is a guide to the tech­nical archi­tec­tures of var­ious video game consoles: NES, Game Boy, Super Nintendo, Genesis, PlayStations 1 through 3, etc.

It is also, I will posit, a basi­cally per­fect web­site. The pre­sen­ta­tion is clear and sturdy, enlivened with media exactly where appropriate. The inter­ac­tive ele­ments are simple and snappy. AND the text is avail­able in like ten dif­ferent lan­guages?! This here is the web done right.

(For the record, it was a random ques­tion about the Game Boy’s four-color dis­play that led me to this compendium. Before I left, I’d read all about the NES and Super Nintendo, too.)

Here is a piece by Matthew Braga, who I’ve long read and admired, on a fas­ci­nating film-historical ques­tion:

[ … ] What should the sea sound like? What should a viewer hear when watching kelp forests sway or sea­horses fight? It wasn’t some­thing anyone had to con­sider before, not seriously. Songs about the sea tended to focus on distance, adventure, danger, and longing — on human con­cerns hap­pening on the surface, not life beneath the waves. But Painlevé wanted his audi­ence to see the ocean as a world like our own; a world of dig­ni­fied sea­horses, stylish crabs, and seduc­tive octopuses, the human con­di­tion ren­dered bub­bling and bulbous. He wanted emotion, move­ment and vibe. Much to the cha­grin of scientists, who did not want such things, Painlevé chose jazz.

What fol­lows is a fun, cross-cut­ting exploration — and a playlist.

Here is Erin McKean’s 2022 word list, always a delight. Necrobotics!

I appre­ci­ated Ted Gioia’s newsletter cheering the recently improved for­tunes of Barnes & Noble, which derive from a renewed respect for its booksellers.

I will always root for this company.

When I was young, my family would decamp to the B&N ten min­utes up the road, and everyone would go their own way, wan­dering and browsing and stacking books (only to abandon most of them; 1990s B&N cafe workers, I am sorry) for what felt like — what may in fact have been — the whole day.

I’ve had reason to remember those trips because I’ve found myself sev­eral times at the B&N in Fresno, where the new era is evident: a mas­sive rearrange­ment of the shelves, a culling and refreshing of the stock, all for the better. The store looks great, and it glows as brightly with invi­ta­tion and pos­si­bility as any B&N ever has.

When I visit that Barnes & Noble, it’s bustling, packed with groups — families, mostly, but also feral packs of manga readers — and the great thing about those stores is, they’re huge. There’s room for every­body.

Yes  …  and?

I’ve linked to Deb Chachra’s energetic vision before, but/and, I’m still thinking about it, so you have to think about it, too:

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.

For me, this remains THE clarion artic­u­la­tion of humanity’s infra­struc­tural future. Our civ­i­liza­tion is going to be pow­ered by the sun. Duh.

(Per­haps I say should say “pow­ered more directly by the sun”: cut­ting out the inter­me­di­aries of oil and gas, their poi­so­nous terms of service.)

Yes, solar panels only work for half the day; yes, the world does not presently pos­sess enough bat­teries (or even per­haps enough lithium?) to sup­port the other half. Yes, where elec­tric cars are concerned — and not only cars, but heat pumps, induc­tion stoves, the whole Elec­tric Cin­e­matic Universe — if every­body bought one, power gen­er­a­tion would have to grow by some ter­ri­fying mul­ti­plica­tive factor.

Yes … and?

Cars are a fruitful analogy for infra­struc­tural change, because they trans­formed the world — its urban fabric, its geopo­lit­ical balance, its cuisines (!)—so com­pletely in a single short cen­tury.

Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kid­ding me? This tech­nology will require a ubiq­ui­tous net­work of refu­eling stations, one or two at every major intersection … even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If every­body buys a car, you’ll need to build highways, HUGE ones — you’ll need to dig up cities! Madness!

Maybe they did say those things. It WAS madness; and the world went mad.

Skep­tics of solar fea­si­bility pan­tomime a kind of tech­nical realism, but I think the really tech­nical people are like, oh, we’re going to rip out and replace the plumbing of human life on this planet? Right, I remember that from last time. Let’s gooo!

I have no doubt whatsoever — not a scrap, not a shred — that humanity can remake the world as com­pletely in this cen­tury as it did in the last.

Here’s Deb:

Every place in the world has sun, wind, waves, flowing water, and warmth or cool­ness below ground, in some combination. Renew­able energy sources are a step up, not a step down; instead of scarce, expensive, and polluting, they have the poten­tial to be abundant, cheap, and glob­ally distributed. Tran­si­tioning all of our infra­struc­tural sys­tems to be pow­ered by renew­able sources is about growing out the number of people who have access to more energy, who ben­efit from using it to meet human needs, whether as basic as cooking food or as modern as global telecommunications.

Her vision remains bracing and inspiring. We can have it if we want it.

Discovering Donegality

Over the past year, I’ve been pon­dering C. S. Lewis, rereading some (not all) of his Chron­i­cles of Narnia, learning more about his influences. I read:

• The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, along with

• parts of The Fellowship by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski (with its imposing subtitle, The Lit­erary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams) and finally

• Planet Narnia by Michael Ward.

In that last book, I encoun­tered a new-to-me line of thinking from Lewis that both mir­rored and deep­ened a feeling that has haunted my own reading and writing as far back as I can remember.

It has to do with vibes.

C. S. Lewis could never quite explain it; here’s Ward describing his attempts:

[Lewis] uses a variety of words in his efforts to catch his meaning. They include: “the ipseitas, the pecu­liar unity of effect pro­duced by a spe­cial bal­ancing and pat­terning of thoughts and classes of thoughts”; “a state or quality”; “flavour or atmosphere”; “smell or taste”; “mood”; “quiddity.” [ … ]

The phrase “bal­ancing and pat­terning” made me gasp, at least inwardly. It sounds exactly right; I believe it is what I have felt myself doing when I have been hap­piest and most excited about my writing.

A few lines later:

Again and again, in defending works of romance [in the chivalric sense], Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is con­ceived with this kind of qual­i­ta­tive rich­ness because romancers feel the real world itself to be “cryptic, significant, full of voices and the mys­tery of life.” Lovers of romances go back and back to such sto­ries in the same way that we go “back to a fruit for its taste; to an air for … what? for itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere — to Donegal for its Done­gality and London for its Londonness. It is noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to put these tastes into words.”

“Done­gality” becomes a key term in Planet Narnia, which, for all its aca­d­emic sobriety, is hon­estly a sort of gonzo puzzle adventure — very Umberto Eco, almost Dan Brown.

Here’s more from Ward on C. S. Lewis and his vibes:

That this atmos­pheric quality is vir­tu­ally inex­press­ible leads Lewis to speak of it at times as a spir­i­tual thing. For instance, it is “the vast, empty vision” of Hamlet that is, in his view, Shakespeare’s chief accomplishment — the sense that “a cer­tain spir­i­tual region” has somehow been cap­tured by the use of images such as night, ghosts, a sea cliff, a graveyard, and a pale man in black clothes. Within the mesh of these images the mys­te­rious epiphe­nom­enal flavour of Hamlet is caught and com­mu­ni­cated to the atten­tive reader or theatregoer. Likewise, in David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, the planet Tor­mance is so described that it amounts to an encap­su­la­tion of “a region of the spirit.” The net of the story — the events, the characters, the back­ground descriptions — has tem­porarily ensnared, as if it were an elu­sive bird, a sheer state of being; and for the dura­tion of the read, this bird’s plumage may be “enjoyed.”

I like Ward’s use of the words “mesh” and “net” there; I might add “web” and “net­work”, even “game”—the sense of pieces arranged on a pat­terned board.

Here, per­haps, is lan­guage for my own most pow­erful responses.

An example: William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy in the 2000s was pro­foundly impor­tant to me — electrifying, the dis­covery that novels can feel like this—but/and I have always strug­gled to explain what about the books was so appealing. It wasn’t their prose, exactly, even though it’s terrific, or their plots, which I cannot recount, or their characters, who were gnomic slabs of style; yet there was in those novels some­thing that I found nowhere else.

So, yes: per­haps it WAS the “spir­i­tual region” they mapped out, the “spe­cial bal­ancing and pat­terning of thoughts and classes of thoughts” they achieved. Per­haps they DID catch some­thing in their “net”: a “sheer state of being” that had to do with sub­limely cool jackets and was clearly (it was the 2000s) some kind of zeitgeist.

William Gibson prob­ably thinks this is stupid, but I don’t care.

It’s impor­tant to say these “regions” are not genres — way too coarse — and they are not authors, either. I have enjoyed William Gibson’s recent novels, but they do not pos­sess, for me, the flavor of the Blue Ant trilogy. That par­tic­ular bird has slipped the net.

Reading about Lewis, learning that he floun­dered in this par­tic­ular bucket, has made me feel more con­fi­dent about my own compulsions. Tolkien called the inven­tion of lan­guages his “secret vice”; it’s pretty clear that Lewis’s was the con­tem­pla­tion of sym­bols and symmetries. It is mine, too — one of them, anyway.

The good stuff can’t be named, only sensed; we are like deer des­per­ately licking our snouts out here. Even so, it’s helpful to have some lan­guage to throw around. Bal­ancing and pat­terning. Meshes and nets. Done­gality!

I wish I could go back in time and offer C. S. Lewis “vibes” in return.

The illus­tra­tions above are by the artist Kawanabe Kyōsai. I found my way to him through this print of a stolid crow — 

—and I had already selected and resized sev­eral nice, “normal” images when I came across his amazing illus­trated diary. Its pages record the inter­ac­tions around “var­ious painting com­mis­sions he car­ried out”; don’t they look like they could have been doo­dled by a comic book artist yesterday?

Kawanabe Kyōsai was known as the “demon of painting” for his unmatched skill and inex­haustible energy. Take a look at his Drawings for Pleasure or his Pictures of One Hun­dred Demons, still fresh and delightful more than a cen­tury after he sat down to draw them.

It’s raining hard here in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area (picture me as the crow, above) and I am deep in book revision, doing absolutely nothing else: a great start to the year. This has delayed my newsletter redesign until next month, which is just fine.

It was a happy sur­prise this week to see Brand New Box’s web edi­tion of the story they com­mis­sioned, and I hope you’ll give it a look.

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on Feb­ruary 5.

January 2023