235: Imagine That, Suckers!
Transcript from 235: Imagine That, Suckers! with Robin Sloan, Elecia White, and Christopher White.
EW (00:00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Embedded. I'm Elecia White, alongside Christopher White. Have you ever read a novel and thought, "That author really understands my world?" Have you ever wanted to have said author on your podcast to geek out about near future science fiction, robot arms, and artificial intelligence?
EW (00:00:24):
If the answer is yes to all that, get your own darn podcast. This one is mine, and our guest is Robin Sloan, author of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" and "Sourdough."
CW (00:00:35):
Hi, Robin. We're thrilled to talk to you today.
RS (00:00:37):
Oh, well, thanks for inviting me on. It's a real pleasure to be here.
EW (00:00:40):
Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
RS (00:00:43):
Sure. Well, I'm a writer. That's how I pay my rent these days. I write fiction, a little bit of short fiction, but mostly novels. But I have both a professional background and I guess a enthusiastic interest in technology.
RS (00:01:00):
I've worked at a couple of different technology companies in the past, and I've been a great enthusiast-grade tinkerer with all kinds of technology my whole life.
EW (00:01:10):
I think that shows. It influences your books. So we will be talking more about technology. But first we have lightning round, -
RS (00:01:18):
Okay.
EW (00:01:18):
- where we ask you short questions. We want short answers, and if we are behaving ourselves, this will go very fast.
RS (00:01:24):
Okay. Very good. I'm ready.
CW (00:01:26):
Okay. Favorite childhood author?
RS (00:01:30):
Roald Dahl.
EW (00:01:32):
Fictional technology that you think will be real in our lifetimes?
RS (00:01:36):
Fictional technology that I think will be real. I think we're going to have voice assistance as good and natural as anything we've ever seen in a movie. J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man.
EW (00:01:48):
Oh, yes.
CW (00:01:50):
Should we bring back the dinosaurs?
RS (00:01:52):
No, but I think we should bring back the woolly mammoth.
EW (00:01:58):
Nothing can go wrong with that plan. California or Michigan?
RS (00:02:03):
California. I'm happy to have been from Michigan, and I still go back all the time, but California is my home now. And I think that's one of the greatest places on earth.
CW (00:02:13):
Book that you wish you'd written?
RS (00:02:15):
Oh, boy. Anything by William Gibson, particularly his later books, his sort of contemporary, Bigend trilogy set in kind of a dark shadowy version of our own world. I think they're just awesome, and my favorite kind of science fiction, or almost science fiction.
EW (00:02:34):
Complete one project or start a dozen?
RS (00:02:37):
Oh boy. That's a hard question. The answer has to be complete one project so you can move on to the next. Always.
EW (00:02:44):
Cool. Alright. So "Mr. Penumbra." This is a book, and every time I try to summarize it, I get lost, whether it is in Dragonlance Chronicles callbacks, or Google politics, or startup culture, or Ruby on Rails coding. And...I can't describe it. I assume you can?
RS (00:03:09):
Well, I usually start simple. Because of course the way the story opens, well, before it gets into all those sort of strange pathways and tendrils into different parts of culture, the way the story opens is pretty simple.
RS (00:03:22):
It's the tale of a young man who loses his sort of tenuous design job in the Great Recession of 2008, and the years shortly after. And kind of desperate for a new gig, he ends up working the late shift, the really late shift, at a 24-bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.
RS (00:03:44):
So of course, as you can imagine, this bookstore is stranger than it appears at first. And it appears pretty strange at first, so that's saying a lot. And this new night clerk kind of finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into this mystery that ends up involving very old books and also pretty new technology.
EW (00:04:04):
And cryptography.
RS (00:04:06):
And cryptography. Codes, puzzles, and the people who like codes and puzzles.
EW (00:04:11):
...I'm glad you couldn't summarize it in three sentences because...it was like an octopus. It had so many different tendrils, but it was all together.
RS (00:04:24):
Yeah. That's good to hear, because I feel like those are the kind of books that I like to read too. And I think you're always trying to some degree to produce the kind of book you would like to read when you're writing one. And I also think that's what novels can do really well.
RS (00:04:38):
I think one of the great strengths of the novel is it can reach out its tentacles into all those worlds and...for the people who know those worlds, it's very satisfying to read about them. And of course, for the people who don't, it's exciting. It's a picture of things that you never knew existed.
CW (00:04:53):
It was unpredictable to me too. That was one of the things I liked about it was, as I was reading the first third, I was like, "Where is he going with this? What is going to happen?"
CW (00:05:01):
...And then toward the end it all makes sense, and comes together, and all those pieces fit. But I like being taken on a journey where I'm not quite sure where I'm going. That's good.
EW (00:05:10):
And yet it was familiar, because -
CW (00:05:13):
Yeah, because of all the elements that we know about. Right.
EW (00:05:13):
- we know about bookstores, and we know about Google. So how did you know about Google politics?
RS (00:05:18):
Oh, good question. So of course, anyone who spends any time working at a tech company, or just connected to computers, or technology, in the Bay Area for long enough, I think ends up getting pulled into Google's orbit somehow. And in my case I've never worked there. I've never been a professional Googler.
RS (00:05:35):
But I did have a roommate who was a Googler for several years, who is also a world-class bridge player...I feel like every Googler is also like, "By the way, casually, I am one of the ten best people in the world at Go, or playing Go and karate at the same time."
RS (00:05:53):
So I had the roommate who was a Googler, and he was always telling me interesting stories. And of course I've been down to the Googleplex several times, particularly when I worked at a company called Current TV, which is...a now defunct, but sort of ambitious little cable TV startup in San Francisco.
RS (00:06:10):
We were doing a bunch of projects with Google. And so I'd go down there, and just get to see the place, and hear how people talked, and what they griped about. And that sort of formed the core of my fictional exaggeration of the real place.
CW (00:06:26):
...I'm going to skip ahead just a little bit, but will not stay there. But in both "Mr. Penumbra" and "Sourdough,"...I was going to ask this question later, but now it seems like the right time. Your portrayal of startups is very accurate, but also kind of love-hate. I can't quite draw a bead on...your feeling about startups.
RS (00:06:52):
I'm glad to hear that actually. There's other works of fiction, plenty of them, that take the pretty purely dark satire -
CW (00:07:04):
Yeah.
RS (00:07:04):
- path. They're like, "Oh, man, this is dystopian stuff. And these are dystopian environments. So let's have some fun kind of painting that dark, creepy picture." And of course there are parts about these companies, both the products they make, and the way that the work kind of unfolds, that is creepy or unhealthy.
RS (00:07:22):
But as someone who worked at a place like Twitter for a couple years, it was really fun too. I found it inspiring to be surrounded by really, really smart, engaged people who are all sort of being called upon to do really, really high-end work.
RS (00:07:40):
I mean, just really the brains, the brains at a place like that, especially if you're someone who is always trying to kind of transmute everyday conversations into something that's going to go on the page, boy, I tell you, I was taking a lot of notes at Twitter, and in all the conversations I had.
RS (00:07:56):
So that's all to say that I think my own feelings are complex...I have a lot of affection for those organizations, and the things they do, and the people who work there. But of course, I think to paint them as any kind of utopian dreamscape of progress is just naïve.
RS (00:08:14):
You have to have a sense of kind of self-awareness and irony about some of the things that are not perfect about Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest.
EW (00:08:23):
And all the startups.
RS (00:08:25):
Yeah.
EW (00:08:25):
The extreme work hours, the focus on work, and then the realization that maybe having a life is worth it.
RS (00:08:35):
Yeah, that's right. And I have to say there was a change actually in...certainly my own awareness, and then also my own rendering of that work, between "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," which was published in 2012, and "Sourdough," which was just published last fall in the tail end of 2017.
RS (00:08:53):
And I think that is a large part of it, that sense of, "Hold on. What are we doing here?" I felt it was both artistically important, and also kind of politically necessary, to maybe dial that part of the picture up, or paint that part of the portrait with kind of brighter shades.
RS (00:09:15):
So yeah, the characters in "Sourdough" are much more aware of kind of the burn of it, and the intensity, and maybe even the burnout of those kind of roles.
EW (00:09:28):
I feel like we've been talking about it because we've all read it. Well, I assume you've read it. You wrote it...Anyway, maybe we should summarize "Sourdough" if you would be so kind.
RS (00:09:39):
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. So "Sourdough," like "Mr. Penumbra's 24 -Hour Bookstore," it's the tale of a young person in the Bay Area, but it's someone on a pretty different trajectory. The protagonist and narrator of "Sourdough" is a young software engineer, originally from Michigan, just like me, who comes out to the Bay Area, following a job.
RS (00:09:56):
She gets hired at a robot factory that's kind of the world's leading producer of these very, very capable robot arms being used in laboratories, and factories, and all sorts of things. So she's a programmer there. It's very exciting. It's an intense place.
RS (00:10:10):
As it turns out, it's a little bit too intense, and she feels herself kind of spiraling down into an abyss. She just doesn't know how to keep up, and she doesn't know how to feed herself along the way.
RS (00:10:20):
So as all this is happening and she's kind of discovering this intense new world of San Francisco and robot making, she, through really strange circumstances, gets her hands on a sourdough starter.
RS (00:10:33):
And this of course is the kind of microbial goop that is really important to baking sourdough bread, to make it all light, and fluffy, and airy, and to give it its kind of tangy flavor. And long story short, she decides she's going to learn how to bake.
RS (00:10:47):
And it is learning to bake with this very strange starter that sets her on a totally different journey into the world of San Francisco Bay Area food. And of course there are lots of mysteries and adventures waiting for her there.
EW (00:11:02):
And San Francisco Bay Area food is not straightforward.
RS (00:11:06):
No.
EW (00:11:06):
You portrayed that as highly politicized and often run by people who have opinions just because they can. How did you learn about that?
RS (00:11:20):
Well,...it is interesting how these things kind of come into your brain and stew there for a while. And yeah, just how you learn about these worlds enough to at least somewhat credibly portray them, sometimes it's reading nonfiction and journalism. Sometimes it's direct experience.
RS (00:11:37):
Sometimes it's a person, truly, a friend, or a partner in my case. Kathryn Tomajan is my partner of many years. She has been in the world of Bay Area food for all those years. And she was really my guide, kind of luring me in and teaching me about what to eat, how to eat, who does what, and how it all works.
RS (00:11:59):
So the book is dedicated to her, and that's because without Kathryn's influence, I would never have even known where to begin writing a book set in the world of food.
EW (00:12:10):
I of course loved the robot arm...I have my own tiny robot arm, and I'm trying to teach it to type, and reading the book, it was like you were in my head. How did that happen?
RS (00:12:26):
That is a great question...Like any thinking person, I have been obsessed with robot arms for a long time. How could you fail to be obsessed with these wonderful, kind of pivoting, agile little creatures? And...I considered getting one once too.
RS (00:12:45):
I have literally no use for a robot arm, but there was some kind of cheap, Kickstartery, robot arm product. And I was like, "Maybe I could find a use for that robot arm." I ended up not joining in that Kickstarter, which I think was a good choice, but I just think they're fascinating.
RS (00:13:01):
And the degree to which they're sort of taking over these tasks one by one, it begins with the really kind of rigid stuff in say a car assembly line, where these huge, huge armatures that are able to lift a whole car chassis, or kind of plug a whole windshield into its hole on the front of the car, are doing their thing.
RS (00:13:24):
And it's impressive. But at the same time, the whole process is very, very rigid. They know exactly what to expect. Everything is in its place perfectly. And in fact, if something is out of place, then everything grinds to a halt. The arms don't know how to kind of recalibrate to that.
RS (00:13:39):
Now, it seems to me, based on what I've seen, and kind of the products that I've seen emerge, things are changing and suddenly these arms are just a lot more kind of flexible.
RS (00:13:49):
And especially with all the sensors and kind of cameras attached to them, they can sort of puzzle their way through situations in a way that is maybe a little spookily human and also really powerful. These arms are going to take over a lot of jobs that are done by people now.
RS (00:14:03):
So you add the beauty of the machine to the sort of economic and political impact of their work, and how could you not want to write about that?
EW (00:14:13):
I completely agree. Completely. But...with either book, were you worried that it was too niche? Niche? How do you say that word? Let's start with that.
CW (00:14:27):
Either way. Either way works.
EW (00:14:27):
Okay. I mean, because there is a lot of engineering and a lot of technology.
RS (00:14:33):
Yeah. That's a good question. And the answer is, yes. I always worry about that. I worry about leaving people behind.
RS (00:14:39):
It's a balancing act, because at the same time, I actually think the greater danger is chickening out and glossing over things, kind of smoothing over the technical edges in the way that frankly most media, most storytelling that involves technology, does.
RS (00:14:56):
Because I think when you do that, frankly, the people who don't understand the tools and the technology, they don't really care. They're just like, "Okay, whatever. I'm here for the story. I'm here for the other stuff. Proceed."
RS (00:15:07):
But then when you smooth things over, the people who do know the real way it works,...you lose that sense of verisimilitude and that respect, honestly, for the industries, for the crafts, for the people who do the work, and also just for the language, for the terminology, and all the wonderful texture of the real deal.
RS (00:15:29):
So in a way, what I'm always more afraid of doing is losing the people who really know this stuff.
RS (00:15:38):
And the truth is you can take anything, no matter how deeply technical it is, and if you embed it in a story, and you put it in the mouth of a compelling character, maybe a character who's explaining it step-by-step to another character, you can get away with anything.
RS (00:15:53):
That's the work of a writer. And nobody should ever say that they're afraid to put something really technical into a book.
EW (00:16:01):
That makes a lot of sense. I know so much about English horse racing from Dick Francis mysteries. And it's not information I would ever use, but it seems accurate.
CW (00:16:12):
Well, and both stories have, and I'm not sure this is a real spoiler to say this,...fantastical or kind of magical realism sort of things occurring in them. So having an anchor of something that is familiar, and definitely real, and analytical was kind of cool.
CW (00:16:29):
Because it was, "Okay, these, these fantastic things are happening, but also there's this real stuff. So there was a nice balance of anchoring things to something familiar.
RS (00:16:38):
One of my favorite things that people say about either book is I couldn't tell where the real world stopped and the fictional world began.
CW (00:16:47):
Yeah.
RS (00:16:47):
Things kind of in that gray area of, "Wait. Did he make that up, or is that a real thing?" And it sends them hustling over to Google to check something out.
RS (00:16:57):
And I just think to be writing a novel in the 21st century, that is just one of the best things you can hear, that every couple chapters people had to just set the book down for a second to run a query and see if they were dealing with your imagination or the weirdness of the world. Love it.
EW (00:17:13):
To go out and buy a robot arm.
RS (00:17:16):
That too. That too. Maybe I should have some sort of commission program where people can use a coupon code from "Sourdough," and they get 5% off a cool industrial robot arm, and I get a cut.
EW (00:17:29):
Are you ever surprised what people get out of the book?
RS (00:17:33):
Oh, always. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I've learned, and this might sound a little basic, but truly it surprised me. People get very different things out of books, and people also read books for different reasons.
RS (00:17:45):
For me as a reader, particularly reader of science fiction, I feel like I'm always interested in just good writing, good prose, in something kind of interesting, and engaging, and a little bit suspenseful, but primarily what I want is cool ideas.
RS (00:18:00):
I want to kind of download stuff into my head that wasn't there before, that kind of gives me that tingle, that little electrical spark of like, "Oh, wow. What if we did install a giant space mirror above Alaska," or whatever. So like that. That's not the case for everyone.
RS (00:18:17):
Other people really read books for relationships. Some people read books just to pass the time. Some people do read books, even novels, to learn about the world. They really love that feeling of like, "Oh, I understand English horse racing now, " or, "I understand what it's like to work at Google now," and on, and on, and on.
RS (00:18:36):
I mean, sometimes people will tell me something they really liked about a book, or frankly, something they didn't like about one of my books, one of the ways in which they thought it fell short.
RS (00:18:46):
And I'll just kind of have to smile and go, "You are a very different reader from me." And I think that's wonderful. I think it's great that there's that variety.
EW (00:18:54):
Okay. I have to ask. What don't people like about it?
RS (00:18:57):
Oh, all sorts of things. One thing that I do notice that always surprises me, particularly with the first one, "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," it's the people who really do read for relationships. People who care very much about the romances of the characters.
RS (00:19:14):
And they get mad that my two kind of main characters, Clay, who's the narrator, and Kat, who's the brilliant Googler, they actually don't end up together in the end of the book. That's a mild spoiler, but I think it's okay. And man, some people are mad at me about that.
RS (00:19:33):
They wanted a happy ending to that romance or a different ending to that romance. And it just always surprises me. I'm like, "But there was a puzzle, and the solution to the puzzle was so cool." They're like, "I don't care. They need to be together."
EW (00:19:49):
Yeah. The drive towards happily ever after is pretty strong among readers. At least for me, I see that a lot. Do people say that it's too much technology?
RS (00:20:05):
Yeah, of course. I mean, at this point, the good news is a book gets enough readers, and anything that can be said about it will be said about it -
CW (00:20:14):
Right.
RS (00:20:14):
- by someone at some point. And yeah, for sure. Particularly "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," there are plenty of readers who, they went in, I think, expecting a very sort of warm, comforting tale of old bookshops and the pleasure of books. Of course, those things are there in the story, but so is Google, and so is technology.
RS (00:20:34):
And by the end they say things like, "Well, I didn't expect to read a 300-page commercial for Google." And again, I always have to smile, and go,..."I think you read it differently than I did," which is totally valid...
RS (00:20:47):
I respect the sort of sovereignty of the reader's take on a book, and if they get something out of it that I didn't expect or didn't intend, I mean, it's there. It's there to be extracted.
RS (00:21:00):
But yeah, there's definitely folks who I think would have preferred a novel that had no code whatsoever, no data visualization, no giant compute clusters, and just was all old books and curling yellow pages.
EW (00:21:16):
Okay. Why do you have all this? I mean, what things came together for you that ended up with a book that wasn't exactly a love letter to technology, but wasn't that far off?
RS (00:21:33):
Yeah. I mean, there's kind of a cliche about first novels in particular where they say, and I mean, some cliches are cliches, because they're a little bit true.
RS (00:21:43):
It goes like this: a first novel is basically a writer kind of unscrewing the top of their head and pouring out the entire contents of their brain into a book because they've had so long to stew. I mean, it's all been building up from the moment they ever imagined writing a book at age seven or whatever it was.
RS (00:22:04):
All the years since it's been building up. And also there's this kind of urgency, this question, "Will I even get to write another one?" And the answer to that, of course, could be no.
RS (00:22:13):
So this pent-up fuel, this sort of sense of urgency, I've got to take my shot, first novels, I think it's true, they tend to have this density, and this almost kind of manic, "Also I'm really into falconry. There's a character who trains falcons," and all this weird stuff.
RS (00:22:34):
And so I think that's the honest answer. "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" was kind of a map of everything I was and am interested in. And I just poured it all in and lit the flame.
EW (00:22:49):
I was terrified of "Sourdough," having purchased "Artemus," but not read it, having purchased "Armada," but not read it, and decided I never would. And then I got "Sourdough," and I was just like, "I'm not sure."
EW (00:23:07):
We met you in a bookshop, and it sat signed for a little while until a close friend said, "No, no, no. It was awesome. I read it in one day. It was awesome."
EW (00:23:21):
And then it sat a little while longer in pure anticipation of knowing I had a good book waiting for me, and I could wait until I was sick, or sad, or something that would make it so that a good book would be there.
EW (00:23:35):
How many people came up to you and said, "Well,...your second book. I don't think you should have." I mean, did you just have nightmares about that? Did it happen? Was it not that bad because people said, "Oh yeah, this is awesome?"
RS (00:23:51):
Yeah. Truly, it was not that bad. Of course, again, these cliches that turn out to have kind of kernels of truth in them, the cliche of the sophomore effort, whether it's a second album from some great, sort of cool, innovative band, or a second novel from a writer you like, it's always very fraught.
RS (00:24:10):
Because of course you want to do all the things that people liked, but not so much, or...with such kind of mimicry, that it just seems like another scoop of the same pudding, right? You want it to be a little bit different too and kind of move forward in some way. And that's hard to do...It's not easy.
RS (00:24:31):
So of course I was worried about it, but the truth is, I had a pretty clear vision for this book and how I wanted it to feel from the beginning, from kind of the initiation of the project...I had this sense of a vibe and a world I wanted it to be set in, some things I wanted to talk about. And it took me a while to get there.
RS (00:24:50):
There were some false starts, and there's a lot of stuff I threw away, which was actually not the experience of writing the first novel. That one was kind of straight through and just kind of step-by-step, things fell into place.
RS (00:25:00):
So the writing of it was harder, but then by the time I was finished with it, I was really happy with what I had produced. I would kind of sit and read it in the editing process as we went through the various drafts. I would just sit, and I would read a few chapters, and they would make me smile.
RS (00:25:14):
I'd be like, "You know what? If I picked this book up off the shelf, I would really like it. I would think this was a cool book that said things about the world that I thought were interesting and kind of was written in a cool, appealing way."
RS (00:25:26):
So I think when you have that feeling, it's a pretty good buffer against the angst and the worry. And then, yeah, as it came out into the world, people said a sufficient quantity of nice things that I felt good about the whole process.
CW (00:25:43):
I know we asked you if you like to...finish one project or start a dozen, but how soon after finishing the first book did you start working on the second, or did they overlap at all?
RS (00:25:54):
Yeah, they definitely overlapped. It was very soon. I'd actually started the earliest, earliest kind of scribblings even before "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" was out on bookstore shelves. It was kind of in the can, going through the production process at the publisher. This was the summer of 2012.
RS (00:26:12):
And I knew I wanted to try to make this my job. I wanted to see if I could kind of keep this going. So I sat down, and I started thinking about what stories could be next. And...I had some funny experiences, kind of...again, through Kathryn, in the world of food.
RS (00:26:27):
Just these sort of little moments, and anecdotes, and things that people would say that, they seemed to sort of turn my presumptions about the world on its head, or kind of maybe twist them off-axis by a few degrees.
RS (00:26:42):
Because of course they were talking about very fancy food, and things that were delicious, and expensive, and very kind of high-end. But then there would be something about the story that involved smuggling things across borders.
RS (00:26:54):
Or someone hiding a clipping of a wine grape in their suitcase to bring it back to California and plant it in their own vineyard, these little bits of almost spy stories that were braided through...the sort of the stories that I expected about food.
RS (00:27:12):
And I just love that feeling. And so that summer I was like, "I think maybe this is the novel I want to write." And so I started it then.
EW (00:27:20):
Did you use it as an excuse to try all the foods, and visit all the wineries, and all the olive trees?
RS (00:27:25):
Yes, definitely. Definitely 100%. One of the great, great benefits of being a fiction writer is that you can justify literally any activity as research.
CW (00:27:36):
So how much time did you spend in the Ferry Building?
RS (00:27:39):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, truly, warning, warning to all aspiring fiction writers out there. It can be dangerous, because it's not just...kind of this fun, kind of boondoggle stuff like, "Well, I don't think I took notes well enough the first time. We'll have to go back up to Sonoma County," or whatever. That's very straightforward.
RS (00:27:57):
It's things very involving hobbies. You're like, "I think maybe I should really learn about ham radio." "Wait, why?" "Well, maybe I'll write a novel about ham radio, or robot arms, or artificial intelligence, or sewing, or soldering, or basket weaving," whatever.
RS (00:28:17):
You can really talk yourself into almost anything, because as it turns out, everything is interesting, and all you need to write a novel is interesting stuff.
CW (00:28:27):
You write a book about ham radio, I'm sure some of our listeners will appreciate that greatly.
RS (00:28:30):
I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.
EW (00:28:33):
So there's a process to writing a book. From the outside, I think the process looks something like step one, write book. Step two, get it published. Step three, dive in piles of cash like Scrooge McDuck. Could you break that down a little further?
RS (00:28:51):
Yeah. Right. I like that. I like that image. That sounds very appealing. Yeah, let's discuss step one. It's different for different kinds of writing and different kinds of creative production. To write something like a short story, well here, let me back up.
RS (00:29:13):
I started with short stories, and I would write them sometimes in a day or in a couple days. And it was very much about sitting down and kind of capturing some feeling that had sort of possessed you...I still remember I would take bike rides around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
RS (00:29:29):
And I would just have odd ideas, and they would start piling up, and suddenly I'd get excited. I'd be like, "Oh, yeah. I could fit those things together. That would be a cool story. And I turned my bike around, and I'd race back to my apartment.
RS (00:29:40):
And I would zoom in, and sit down at my laptop, and just start typing. And then by the afternoon of the next day I would have a draft of some little scrap of a short story...And I feel like that's the feeling of writing that is often depicted in movies or in whatever sort of televisual depictions of the craft.
RS (00:29:58):
It's sort of the inspired writer kind of bent over the typewriter, going tappa tappa tappa tappa tappa tappa tappa [keyboard sounds], and it's all coming out. And it's all exciting.
RS (00:30:06):
The difference I learned between writing something like that, a short story and a novel, really is endurance, sort of systems, and really just a dedication to sitting in the same chair, maybe not every day, but a lot of days, and doing the work, and putting in the time...Writing a novel is not like writing 30 short stories.
RS (00:30:35):
It's like writing one novel, and it takes a lot of time. And that time is spent alone, which I think a lot of people, on some level they sort of know that, but then, confronted with sitting alone at their kitchen table all weekend, many weekends in a row, are kind of like, "No, this was not my vision for my life."
RS (00:30:54):
And they decide to do something else. But if you can do it, if you can keep your butt in the chair, alone, and kind of confront the words on the screen, enough time passes, and you have something that maybe you could pull into shape and turn into an novel.
CW (00:31:11):
Sounds just like software engineering.
RS (00:31:13):
...I think there's real truth to that. I think software engineering, of course, it depends on the project, it depends on what you're doing. I think it's actually more structured and has the benefit perhaps of beginning with kind of a defined vision of the end state.
RS (00:31:29):
You're like, "I want to write a program to do this thing for me," or, "I want to write a web application that's going to kind of provide these features or these tools."
RS (00:31:38):
And of course the problem with novel writing is that you're defining the goal at the same time and redefining the goal constantly as you're producing it. Maybe what I'm saying is that there's just a lot of spaghetti code in novels.
CW (00:31:55):
I've definitely worked at places where the software process is exactly like a novel process.
RS (00:31:58):
Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
CW (00:31:58):
"What are we doing? I don't know. Let's write some code."
RS (00:32:00):
Fair enough. Fair enough.
EW (00:32:02):
Well, going into that, do you start out with an outline? I mean, I guess that's sort of a software spec.
RS (00:32:08):
Right. Right, right. And this is where the experience and the kind of practices of writers vary so, so widely. I am sort of in the middle. There's people who, they outline, and their outline is almost a mini novel. You could read the outline, and it would be real kind of clunky, and not very much fun, but you would get something out of it.
RS (00:32:26):
You would get a story out of it. Conversely there's other writers who do this thing of just going almost sentence by sentence, and they'll say that they get to the next page and it completely surprises them. They're like, "Whoa, I did not see that coming. Okay. Well, let's see where it goes."
RS (00:32:39):
It's a very kind of organic, improvisational process. And I mean, most people of course are somewhere in between those extremes.
RS (00:32:46):
And I am one of them. I make notes about the overall structure, and I kind of know the things that I want to appear along the way, the things that I'm interested in, whether that's a character, or a certain setting, or a technology, or just an idea.
RS (00:32:59):
And I have just notes, and notes, and notes, megabytes of text...that I've collected over the years, little scraps that I know I want to find a place for at some point. But then the process of getting from point to point and kind of unfolding the story for me, it actually is a little more organic.
RS (00:33:17):
I have never been quite organized or disciplined enough to do the Heading "A," Subheading G, Point 3, "Clay will walk into the bookstore," sort of outline.
EW (00:33:33):
That makes writing nearly mechanical.
RS (00:33:36):
Yeah. I mean, it's so funny. Again, there's so many different kinds of readers. There's also so many different kinds of writers, and I love it. I love that sort of just almost Cambrian explosion diversity.
RS (00:33:49):
And you look at a very successful writer, someone like James Patterson. I mean, this is one of the most widely read writers probably in history, not known for literary grace, or necessarily for saying deep, profound things about the world, but writes stories that people enjoy, and writes them very consistently, churns them out.
RS (00:34:07):
And it turns out that the way that James Patterson writes is actually quite mechanical. It's almost like a fiction factory. He has a crew of writers that he's hired. Some of them get credit on the books, others don't. And many of them work from an outline that he prepares.
RS (00:34:24):
He will come up with his sort of notes toward the, whatever, 17th volume in whatever suspense series he's working on and then hand it off. And that person will sort of inflate that spec into a mass of words, presumably hand that back to James Patterson at some point while he'll make a few red marks and send it back.
RS (00:34:47):
And eventually, it shows up on the shelves in Target, and Walmart, and everywhere else, and sells 5 million copies. And yeah, of course, there are some things about that process that are pretty cynical and grim.
RS (00:34:58):
But I also admire the creativity to sort of say, "You know what? There's probably a lot of different ways to make a book that people want to read, and let's try one that does not conform to the image of the inspired writer at her desk in the morning with her cup of coffee." I think that's okay to experiment and play a little bit like that.
EW (00:35:20):
So I kind of want to ask you what your next book is about, but I don't think you'll tell me, so what new technologies are you exploring right now?
RS (00:35:29):
Oh. Oh, that's so sneaky. That's so sneaky, and it's going to work. Your gambit will work. Yes, I will. I will tell you. And for the observant listener, there is a good reason to believe that this actually will provide some evidence of the subject of my next fiction project.
RS (00:35:51):
I, like a lot of people, like almost everyone it seems these days, am pretty preoccupied by artificial intelligence, and these sort of machine learning tools that can take a corpus of data, whether it's images, or sound, or words, text, and do something, transform it in some way, learn to mimic it really well, learn to kind of tell the difference between different kinds.
RS (00:36:16):
In particular, I would say my focus has been on machine learning as it gets applied to text, because of course, text is kind of my business. And I'm interested in machine learning models that help you generate text.
RS (00:36:27):
It turns out there's just all sorts of interesting things you can do if you can gather together megabytes and megabytes of something. Maybe it's all the old Sherlock Holmes stories. Maybe it's a corpus of Golden Age science fiction stories. Maybe it's contemporary fiction. Maybe it's newspaper articles. You can pick.
RS (00:36:46):
You can feed that into one of these models and then ask it to generate different kinds of things, a paragraph of text, a sentence. You could ask it to take one of your sentences and kind of transform it to seem more like that style that it's learned so well. And I just think that is fascinating.
RS (00:37:04):
...Learning the tools, and some of the math, and techniques behind them, has been just interesting for me. I kind of have felt little folds forming in my brain as I try to make sense of this stuff. And I think the creative potential is actually profound.
RS (00:37:18):
So I want to be one of the first writers to actually use these tools to produce fiction that somehow kind of involve artificial intelligence or machine learning as a tool alongside the keyboard and the notepad.
EW (00:37:32):
So you're replacing yourself.
RS (00:37:37):
No...I take pains to say no, definitely not. Because...it's so interesting, there's definitely plenty of people out there who are kind of researchers or creative mavericks who are trying to kind of design systems that could write a story on their own. You kind of feed in a few parameters, or not.
RS (00:37:58):
Maybe just say, "Go for it," and it could produce this sort of coherent short story. And it would be maybe interesting to read. And technically it's an interesting challenge, but creatively as with a writer and a reader, I just think it's such a dead end, because there's no shortage of stories to read.
RS (00:38:17):
I mean, it'd be one thing if the world was facing some great fiction drought and it was like, "Oh, there's just not enough fiction. We need something. We need some machine to make this process more efficient so we could finally have enough fiction to read." Of course that's not the case.
RS (00:38:31):
We're drowning in it, and people who like to read are always lamenting they don't have enough time to read all the things that they want to read. So while you could replace a human fiction writer, I don't think there's a really good reason to, certainly not a good economic reason, and also not even a good aesthetic reason.
RS (00:38:51):
What's more interesting, therefore, is finding ways to sort of augment the capabilities of human writers so that they can write stories that are stranger, or I don't know, just different than what they would have written otherwise.
EW (00:39:06):
Alright. I have a lot more questions, but I think I need to wait until your next book comes out.
RS (00:39:10):
Oh, that's fair. I pledge to return, and we can talk all about it...Yeah, artificial intelligence is the core of it. It's another California story...Yeah, and hopefully it'll have some interesting things to say about creativity, and machine minds, and also have some mysteries, and suspense, and adventure, and all that stuff too.
EW (00:39:32):
But this isn't your first foray into artificial intelligence.
RS (00:39:37):
No, I've been preoccupied with this stuff for some time now. Yeah. I would say it's been kind of my main technical enthusiast hobby for about two years, which corresponds roughly to the emergence of the first sort of open source tools that made it possible for a low-to-medium-level programmer like me to actually play with this stuff.
RS (00:39:58):
Which is to say not an AI researcher who kind of could code all of the gnarly math by hand, which I definitely can't. And so that stuff first started to appear about two years ago, and like a lot of people, I kind of glommed onto it, like, "Oh, what's this?"
RS (00:40:11):
And boy, I have to say, a lot of the work tends to deal with images, and it's all very kind of interesting and spooky. But that by itself was not enough to really grab my attention. If it had just been the image stuff, I think I would have been like, "Oh, wow. Cool. Interesting stuff," and sort of moved on.
RS (00:40:28):
It was these machine learning models for text that I would download the code, and kind of get it running on my computer, and train it on some corpus of text. In my case, it was a bunch of science fiction stories...I'd collected all these scans of old science fiction magazines from the 50s and 60s, and so I had this big bundle of stuff.
RS (00:40:46):
So I trained this model on this corpus, and I was like, "Okay, model what have you got? What have you learned?" And the text it generated was so weird. I mean,...it was a perfect sort of imitation of the style.
RS (00:41:01):
It would talk about stars, and spaceships, and jet packs, and the sort of slightly overwrought, kind of purple-ish prose, weird adjectives, and adverbs, and things like that. It sounded just right.
RS (00:41:15):
But then of course it would spiral off in strange directions, because it didn't really know what was going on in these stories. And it would use word combinations that I would never have imagined, but they ended up being really beautiful and appealing.
RS (00:41:28):
And as soon as I saw that, and again, this is two years ago, I was like, "Oh man, that's something right there. That's a thing that could be useful, and interesting, and rewarding." So that kind of sent me on my journey to try to integrate these tools into my own work.
EW (00:41:44):
What tools are you using, and how did you learn them?
RS (00:41:47):
Well, let's see. Right now, the focus is to take these machine learning models and the different things they can output and actually bring it into the text editor.
RS (00:41:56):
Because right now, of course, most of it happens on the command line, which is fine for people running research, and they want to just kind of generate output, and compare it to some benchmark to see if they've achieved some new state of the art, or whatever.
RS (00:42:08):
Maybe it's running on a web server and doing something for consumers. For me, I want to actually use this text. I want to use it in creative ways. So that means it has to be in the text editor.
RS (00:42:17):
So most of my work has been kind of wiring up these models, these systems, these neural networks, that other people have for the most part kind of designed and really kind of polished. But I'm wiring those up so that I can kind of summon that help, that input right there in the text editor, as I'm working on writing of my own.
RS (00:42:38):
And yeah, I mean, I use a whole variety of different things. Some of it is based on Google's TensorFlow neural network software, which is awesome. I mean, basically it all runs in the programming language called Python, which I was new to.
RS (00:42:53):
But like a lot of these languages, it's easy enough to kind of learn the four things about its syntax that you really need to know to kind of hack something together. But there's a bunch.
RS (00:43:05):
It's good news that in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, there's a real ethic of sharing your work and kind of producing usable open source code. So there's no shortage of things you can kind of clone off of GitHub and get running on your own computers pretty fast.
EW (00:43:23):
And you made a neural net for audio for "Sourdough."
RS (00:43:28):
Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. That...was a unanticipated product of this learning, this weird kind of preoccupation. In "Sourdough," a big part of the story has to do with very strange music.
RS (00:43:43):
And of course in the book, that's the wonderful thing about fiction, you can just say, "Oh, it's a very mysterious music that sounded like nothing she had ever heard before. The syllables danced on the edge of understanding, but didn't seem like any language she knew. [Dah, dah, dah]." And you're like, "Cool. Okay. Imagine that, suckers!"
RS (00:44:03):
But as it turns out, audiobooks are very, very popular. It's actually an important part of any book's kind of life in the world these days.
RS (00:44:11):
A lot, a lot of people listen to novels on audiobook and contemplating the release of Sourdough's audiobook, I knew it'd be kind of a disappointment to just have that description there, read by the narrator and not offer anything, not even the faintest sort of ghostly suggestion of what that music actually sounds like.
RS (00:44:30):
So using a process very similar to what I described for text, except for audio, I took some of the music, the real music, that had inspired those descriptions, fed it into a neural network, had it kind of learn the patterns, the shapes, of those sounds, and then generate some new sound of its own.
RS (00:44:48):
Which as with the text sounded sort of recognizable, but also very weird, and kind of inhuman, and alien. And it turned out to just have a sound that was really appealing and actually appropriate for the way I had described the music.
RS (00:45:03):
So I took a bunch of the output, and I zipped it up, and sent it off to an unsuspecting audio book producer who then found ways to kind of thread it through the audiobook. It was cool. It was really, really a satisfying...way to actually use those tools and produce something, creatively, very interesting.
CW (00:45:23):
I find fascinating...that the neural net stuff and the machine learning stuff, you hear about it in the press, it's all about self-driving cars or replacing your jobs, but there've been a whole bunch of creative people, artists, and authors, and musicians, who've been applying it to art.
CW (00:45:43):
And that was kind of unexpected to me when you first started hearing about it becoming a real thing again, after many, many years of, "This is coming soon."
CW (00:45:53):
But I've seen compositions created by neural nets, and you've seen the thing where you can take any image and apply an artist's style to it by running it through some training set. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's surprising me.
RS (00:46:13):
...No, I think that observation is spot on. I think it is actually a little bit surprising and very exciting. And...thank goodness for open source culture.
RS (00:46:23):
Thank goodness that even at these titanic mega-corporations, there is a sort of expectation bordering on obligation that you're going to work on this stuff, you're going to develop new tools.
RS (00:46:36):
And then you're going to share them with everyone, with documentation, with instructions, for how to actually get this stuff up and running for free, just so we can see what happens. And truly all the artist stuff, so many of these creative coders are really, really talented programmers in their own right.
RS (00:46:54):
But I would just say based on my own experience and my own conversations, they're not at the level where they could implement the instructions in one of these academic papers from scratch. Of course, people at Google could do that, or they do do that all the time.
RS (00:47:08):
They're like, "Oh, that's very interesting, this new work that just came out of Montreal." And they sit down, and they're reading the equations, and sort of just nimbly transforming that into Python code. That's a whole other level.
RS (00:47:20):
And there's this whole mass of people who, they can snap things together. They can make computers do what they want, especially if it comes to graphics, and sound, and things like that.
RS (00:47:28):
And so to suddenly just have those pieces, those really deep, mathy, very, very optimized pieces available to them, thanks to Google, and Facebook, and different academic institutions, and others, it just opens up this whole world of really, really interesting possibilities.
RS (00:47:48):
I think it's hugely exciting. And...new things are emerging literally every week. It's really just a fun world to be following right now.
EW (00:47:56):
My background is engineering and computers, and I have been learning about machine learning, and it's not easy. Do you find it intimidating? How do you get over that?
RS (00:48:11):
I think this is where kind of coming at things as a, I don't know, permanent beginner, or...this sort of proudly enthusiast-level practitioner really helps.
RS (00:48:22):
Because certainly if you're working at Google, or just in kind of a social network of programmers, I think, my perception, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but my perception is that there's a bit of pressure to kind of always kind of reassure people that yes, you too are a very talented coder.
RS (00:48:41):
And of course you understand this. You are one with the computer. Whereas for me, I just have always been comfortable with the fact that I really don't understand most of this stuff. It's really, I mean, so easy. I feel like I'm always wading in the ocean.
RS (00:48:54):
And I'll take a step, and be like, "[Oop], that's too deep. Back, back, back, back back," just make sure the water is only up to my knees. And with that sort of admission of a ceiling to your skill comes a kind of freedom to sort of play, to muddle through, to snap things together.
RS (00:49:12):
I was talking with a class at Stanford. It was actually a science fiction class. And...I'd been invited by the professor to come in and talk about writing and actually talk about some of this neural network stuff as well. And many of the students in the class are computer science majors.
RS (00:49:27):
They want to become engineers at Google or places like that. And I was talking to one of them about the choice of tools. I was like, "Well, you know -," thought I was giving him sage advice. I was like, "Yeah. I find TensorFlow, Google's thing, to be really useful. And it's really, really well-documented, which is the main thing."
RS (00:49:45):
And he looked at me so flatly, and he was like, "Oh, no, I think I'm probably going to implement all my tools from scratch. I really think I need to understand how they work at the most basic level." I was like, "[Ah], yes, we are different."
CW (00:50:02):
Well, that's also a trap that a lot of us -
EW (00:50:05):
Yeah.
CW (00:50:05):
- engineer types get into. I don't really understand this,...but I want to use it. But I'm not going to let myself use it until I understand it from first principles. And then you get lost and never complete anything.
EW (00:50:17):
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. So much yes. It's nice to allow yourself the freedom to not have to understand it from first principles. Okay. So moving on, because I have a few more questions that I definitely want to ask. What is your favorite nonfiction book?
RS (00:50:40):
Oh, boy. My favorite nonfiction book. That's a hard question,...and I always think when questions like that are posed, the most honest thing is to say just the first thing that pops into your head.
RS (00:50:50):
And something did pop into my head, so I'll tell you what it is, with the caveat that this is probably not the accurate answer. If I sat for three days, I would come up with the real true nonfiction book of my soul.
RS (00:51:00):
But the book that popped into my head is a book called "Home" by a writer named Witold Rybczynski, who is a longtime writer about architecture, and kind of how buildings come together, and the aesthetics of buildings. "Home" is sort of a social history of the idea of home. Short little book. I mean, it can't be more than 250 pages.
RS (00:51:19):
And kind of step by step, he talks about the emergence in all sorts of different places, England, Northern Europe, different parts of Europe, different parts of the world, the emergence of kind of the building blocks of what we, at least in the U.S. today, think of as a very normal home.
RS (00:51:36):
And it's everything from the bedroom, to the kitchen, to the way windows work, to the very idea that a home should be at least a little bit private or a little bit comfortable. He's like, "Chapter three, The Invention of Comfort."
RS (00:51:52):
And you're like, "Wait. The invention of, that wasn't, [huh]?" And he's like, "No, that wasn't a thing until the 1600s in Amsterdam," or whatever.
RS (00:52:00):
And it's exemplary of the kind of nonfiction books I really like, which are the ones that take something that seems so normal as to be just a natural law, almost like, "Of course, that's the way the world is. How could the world be a different way?"
RS (00:52:15):
And then kind of step by step the writer shows you how it's in fact, the weirdest thing ever, and totally contingent, and a product of strange and unpredictable historical forces. So "Home."
EW (00:52:27):
Cool. I have been reading a lot about octopus and squid, all the cephalopods.
RS (00:52:34):
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
EW (00:52:36):
And...it's the non-human sentience or intelligence that is just amazing to me. Did you read any of those types of books when you wrote "Sourdough?" Because maybe I shouldn't spoil that -
RS (00:52:50):
Yeah. Oh, no, no, no.
EW (00:52:51):
- there's some form of non-human sentience.
RS (00:52:54):
Yeah, definitely. No, that's a good tease. That's a good tease. Come for the robot arms, stay for the non-human sentience. Yeah. I did. I definitely did read books like that. My reading was more about, of course, microbes and microbial communities.
RS (00:53:08):
It's a cool time to be learning about that stuff, because our understanding of microbes, the way they work in the human body, the way they work in nature, has really grown by leaps and bounds in just the last decade. And again, just like artificial intelligence, there's really wild, new things emerging it seems like every week.
RS (00:53:28):
And yeah, I really loved reading about the sort of emergence of really sophisticated behaviors from these little building blocks. I mean, we know what microbes are. It's not like they're hiding a secret brain in the ninth dimension. I mean, well, maybe they are, but probably not. Probably not. Probably not.
RS (00:53:45):
They probably are just the little very simple cellular organisms that they appear to be, but it turns out some of the tools they have, like the chemical signaling, using electricity, and light, and all sorts of things like that, and then all together in these enormous communities, really, really amazing behaviors can emerge.
RS (00:54:05):
And I tried to put some of that into "Sourdough," but of course it didn't all fit, or it didn't all make sense. And...I would read some of these books or articles about microbes and the things they can do. And it would just leave me feeling dizzy.
EW (00:54:20):
Yes. Oh, the microbes books. And there are a couple out now that are just, how did we not understand that we're colonies? We're barely human.
RS (00:54:31):
Yeah.
EW (00:54:31):
Only half, really.
RS (00:54:33):
Right. Totally. Totally...Exactly...I was at a brewery a few nights ago, and kind of looking at the vats, and I was like, "Oh man, this is the planet of the yeast." They have got us so under their thumb. They are just like, "Yes, human, feed me so that I may grow and reproduce." And we're like, "Yes, yeast. Yes. Whatever you say."
CW (00:54:55):
It tricked us into providing for it.
RS (00:54:58):
Yeah.
EW (00:54:59):
Who domesticated who here?
CW (00:55:00):
Exactly.
RS (00:55:00):
Exactly. Exactly.
EW (00:55:03):
Chris, I've been totally hogging the microphone, -
CW (00:55:06):
It's your show.
EW (00:55:06):
- because I have all kinds of questions. Do you have any?
CW (00:55:09):
Yeah, well, I noticed, and I haven't dug into this yet, but I noticed following you on Twitter that you have a low-tech, artisanal, publishing thing? A zine?
RS (00:55:24):
Yeah.
CW (00:55:24):
What are you doing?
EW (00:55:25):
The kids call them zines.
RS (00:55:25):
Zines.
CW (00:55:25):
Yeah, the kids call them zines.
RS (00:55:28):
Zines. Yeah. This is a new project for this year. It's kind of something I'm adding to my little portfolio of work. Of course I'm working on a new novel and doing some of these tech experiments, but I also continue to write short fiction. And I know other folks who write short fiction.
RS (00:55:41):
It is my perception or my opinion I should say, that there are not a lot of really great homes for short fiction these days. Magazines don't publish it much. And the things they do choose to publish to me are just a little weird. It's not really the kind of stuff that I want to read.
RS (00:55:57):
And places that publish it online are great, except for the fact that, speaking as a reader myself, I just find it really, really hard to kind of get absorbed by a short story in a web browser. I start with the best intentions every time, but then I get distracted and kind of bail five paragraphs in.
RS (00:56:15):
So the project is to present some short stories written by me and many written by others, people I know and like, in a different format. And so you go to the webpage, which is wizard.limo, or you can just search for Penumbra's New Fiction on Google, which might be easier.
RS (00:56:32):
Or go to my website and find a link to it from there. And you get two options. There's always one story on offer at a time, just sort of the special of the day.
RS (00:56:43):
And you can either buy a printed copy from me, I've got a little printing setup here at my media lab in South Berkeley, and they're just these wonderful little simple, humble two-color prints. And I sell them for 89 cents, and you get that mailed to you in an envelope, or you can print it yourself.
RS (00:57:01):
And that part of the trick of the website is that it won't actually let you view the story in the browser. It will only let you view it if you press the button to print or hit Command-P, and then it'll come out very happily on your printer, and you can enjoy it later offline.
EW (00:57:17):
Sorry, I am lost in defeating his technology...because I do read everything on a screen. And yet paper's nice. Paper goes to the beach better.
CW (00:57:30):
I've been finding that paper is much more enjoyable, but I don't know why yet.
RS (00:57:36):
I mean, I think,...again, this is just my opinion, and there's so many different ways to read and enjoy things. So...I would never claim this is true for everyone, but for me, what makes fiction work is a certain kind of dream state. I mean, I think that's what fiction is. That's what a novel is.
RS (00:57:50):
I think it's kind of a bundled up dream that you sort of load into your head almost like a video game cartridge or something like that. And I just think it's harder, not impossible, but harder, to kind of boot up that dream state in the context of a crowded web browser full of tabs and other things trying to get your attention.
RS (00:58:08):
I think it actually just is easier to kind of get there when you're looking at something on a piece of paper away from the screen.
CW (00:58:17):
Maybe it's like the 24-frame-per-second flicker of old film. The whole gestalt of the whole thing.
RS (00:58:25):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, that's right. There's other cues, sort of social and cultural cues like, "This is what I'm doing. This is what this is." Yeah. I think that's right.
EW (00:58:34):
What question should we ask you? I mean, you do a fair number of interviews, and you do readings. What don't you get asked that you just kind of wish people would ask you?
RS (00:58:48):
Oh, boy, good question. Well, I don't know if there's a lot. I always enjoy talking about other writers that I like. It's actually a pretty common question, like, "Oh, well, who inspired you," or "Who are your favorite writers working these days?"
RS (00:59:04):
Because of course it's always fun to kind of spread the love around. I think it's important too. It's a way of kind of keeping the wheel turning. No book can ever exist in isolation.
RS (00:59:13):
Every book kind of trains readers to want more books like that, and at a certain point you've got to switch authors. You've got to jump to the next stone in the stream. So I always like talking about other writers who are great.
EW (00:59:29):
Alright. What other writers should we talk about?
RS (00:59:33):
Oh, boy. Here, I'll name two, just because they're top of mind and wonderful. One is a science fiction writer named Ann Leckie. She recently wrote a trilogy of books.
RS (00:59:43):
The first one is called "Ancillary Justice," and they're set in the far, far future, sort of unrecognizable, cosmic civilization that emerged from Earth, however many tens of thousands of years ago in her timeline. And it's a story kind of galactic politics.
RS (01:00:02):
And there's cool military stuff, and there's sort of suspense, and somebody gets murdered. But the best thing about it is actually her depiction of an artificial mind.
EW (01:00:12):
Yeah.
RS (01:00:12):
The main character of the book is a ship actually. It's sort of the mind of one of these great ships. And I don't think it's really a spoiler to say this, because it's the first thing that happens in the book. The ship is destroyed as an act of great betrayal.
RS (01:00:25):
And this mind, this vast mind, that's used to seeing the world through all these sensors and all these different eyes is sort of diminished. It's trapped inside one body. And the story proceeds. It's...almost like a murder mystery, actually, a murder mystery in space.
RS (01:00:42):
But the way she writes about this mind, sort of confronting, like, "You've got to be kidding me. I just have two hands? Uh, how am I going to make this work?" It's just awesome. And there's other parts of the story that are just, it's delightful and kind of dizzying to read.
EW (01:01:01):
And she put you in the mind, and it felt entirely foreign.
RS (01:01:06):
Yeah. Yeah.
EW (01:01:07):
It was really cool, because...it didn't feel like you were in another human's brain, you -
RS (01:01:16):
That's right. That's right. Yeah. She didn't kind of fall into that trap, which is more common than not, of, "Yeah it's an artificial mind that just so happens to act and feel exactly like a butler."
CW (01:01:30):
Yeah. Right.
RS (01:01:30):
Or like, "Oh yes, actually,...what I'm looking for is some sexy robots." Like, "What? No,...I think artificial minds are going to be interested in other things." And she does it. She nails it. It's a real achievement. It really is.
EW (01:01:45):
Do you want to give us another one?
RS (01:01:47):
Sure. There's a writer named Nicola Griffith who's really, really great. She wrote a book a few years ago called "Hild," H-I-L-D. And it's very different from the far future science fiction. It is set in sixth-century England.
RS (01:02:04):
And it's a story of a woman, a real historical woman, who became a saint at some point, but we don't get to that in this book yet. In this book, she is just part of this kind of Anglo-Saxon situation. It's this moment in history that was actually really strange and surprising to me.
RS (01:02:24):
It's definitely not the sort of Middle Ages of King Arthur, and knights, and all that, and the Game of Thrones sort of vibe. Because it's real. It's really historical. It's this in-between time, and it's so well-told. I mean,...it's one of those books that's completely engrossing.
RS (01:02:41):
It's big. It's probably 500-plus pages, with a map in the front, of course, which is awesome, and the table of characters so you can keep track of who's related to who. And two chapters in you're just lost.
RS (01:02:54):
You're lost in Hild's world, and the natural descriptions, the politics of her world, and the different chieftains, and who's kind of trying to take control of whom. It is totally, totally enthralling. And it's the perfect winter book. I don't know what the weather's going to stay like. It's kind of been weird lately.
RS (01:03:13):
We might be out of proper winter, but in any season that is dark, and rainy, and/or cold. This book is the book for those times. You just curl up, you make some tea, and you lose yourself in this book. "Hild." It's awesome.
EW (01:03:31):
Unshockingly to everyone who listens to the show and knows how much I love to read, I now have to go, and purchase this book, and curl up on the couch, -
CW (01:03:41):
I'm just surprised you haven't already read it.
EW (01:03:41):
- so I'm out of questions. And it was -
RS (01:03:42):
Yes.
EW (01:03:42):
- nice to have you Robin. I'll talk to you -
RS (01:03:46):
The old abrupt book recommendation ending. So long, got to go.
EW (01:03:52):
Seriously, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? We have kept you a good long while, and while I could just stay, and stay, and ask you to tell me stories, I feel like we should let you go.
RS (01:04:03):
Sure. Well, here's a closing thought. It actually connects, kind of loops back around to the beginning, and our lightning round, and that question about starting things and finishing things. I will just say, and I always say this to people who ask about writing, and becoming a writer, and all that kind of stuff.
RS (01:04:19):
It's one of the things that I learned early on that I still remind myself of all the time. Even before I had finished writing these short stories years ago, and that was, of course, before I had written any novels, I thought of myself as a writer or an aspiring writer.
RS (01:04:33):
And I would often start things, big things, things I imagined would be big, novels, fantasy trilogies, all sorts of stuff. Like a lot of people, this is not an uncommon experience, I would kind of get frustrated with how it was turning out. Of course it wasn't as good as I imagined it would be.
RS (01:04:50):
And I would kind of taper off and forget about it eventually. And the thing that really unlocked writing as a craft for me was deciding to just finish things and really what that meant was that things could be short. I had a couple of friends that were kind of my writing buddies.
RS (01:05:07):
We would always meet, and swap drafts of things, and sort of read stuff aloud to each other. We all liked the same kind of things, the same kind of science fiction and fantasy, and sort of magical realism, and all that. And some of the things I would write for that little group would be three paragraphs long.
RS (01:05:25):
But the important thing is that I said it was done. I would start, and it would have a beginning, and it'd have a very quick middle, and then an end, some kind of end. And I put a title on it. And even though it was just the tiniest scrap of something, to say I was done, and then share it with friends, that was it.
RS (01:05:43):
That was like rocket fuel, because it felt so good. It was the opposite of that sort of draining feeling of, "Oh, I guess I'm actually terrible at this and hopeless, because I'll never actually finish anything."
RS (01:05:55):
Instead you're like, "Heck yeah. I finish things all the time. I wrote something that was three paragraphs long, which means I could probably write something that's six paragraphs long. And if I could write something six paragraphs long, I could definitely write something a page long."
RS (01:06:08):
"And if I could write something a page long, I might be able to write something three pages long," and no joke. You can just kind of stair step it up until you're writing short stories and longer stuff, novellas, and then you're off to the races.
RS (01:06:21):
So I guess my final thought...certainly for people who are interested in fiction, but I think it applies to other kinds of endeavors too, is there's a real freedom and power, fuel, that comes with the ruthlessness of making yourself a really, really tiny project, starting it, and finishing it, and announcing that it's done. So that's my final thought.
EW (01:06:46):
That is very relevant to many endeavors.
CW (01:06:49):
Yeah. I have a lot of 30-second songs.
RS (01:06:52):
Yeah. There you go.
EW (01:06:55):
Our guest has been Robin Sloan, author of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" and "Sourdough." You can find his books at a bookstore near you or of course on Amazon. Check out his website, robinsloan.com, where you can read some short fiction and sign up for his sporadic but quite interesting newsletter.
EW (01:07:15):
Thank you for being with us, Robin.
RS (01:07:16):
Oh, boy. Such a pleasure. Thank you.
EW (01:07:18):
Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Bookshop Santa Cruz for having Robin come through on his book tour. It was wonderful to meet him. He did not put his neural net outline in my book to sign, even though that's what I asked for. Personalization these days. Of course, thank you for listening.
EW (01:07:40):
You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm. There'll be lots of links so go ahead and look on embedded.fm this week. And now a final thought to leave you with, from me. This one's from Eleanor Roosevelt. "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
EW (01:08:01):
Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California.
EW (01:08:13):
If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.