(2024-01-31) Sloan Hit The Lights

Robin Sloan: Hit the lights. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s been a multimodal week. I’ve traveled aboard multiple ferries, several trains — including the new SMART line in Sonoma County, terrific — and, notably, my first robo-car, one of the whirring Waymos

I just cannot go along with any storyline in which the introduction of these swirling, flexible fleets nets out as a bad thing.

Waymo’s robo-cars make the world more interesting, not less

You’ll receive a powerful premonition of the future, wrapped up in a glossy white package that beeps and hums and coos, marshaling every sensory cue in its attempt to cushion — not quite successfully — the ghostly sight of a steering wheel spinning on its own.

ad-tech this ain’t. The people who worked on these cars accomplished something difficult and meaningful.

When did the “cover reveal” become a thing in book publishing?

As the first advance copies of Moonbound have crept out into the world, they have worn this cover, suspiciously plain

It’s not unpretty; look at that logotype! But clearly … something is being withheld.

Are you ready for the reveal?

This is the work of Na Kim, who is, in my estimation, simply the best book cover designer working today

The year ahead will be pivotal, for me and my writing. I’m going to need your support, and I’m going to call upon it, if you’ll allow me.

let’s just enjoy that cover! There’s a stunning animated rendition over on Instagram, almost like a micro mini cinematic adaptation

On Wednesday, January 24, at Shack15 in the Ferry Building, I’ll chat with Kyle Chayka about his new book, Filterworld

I was delighted to find Moonbound included among Andrew Liptak’s most anticipated books of 2024. His newsletter, Transfer Orbit, has become an essential resource for tracking new and interesting science fiction

Recently, I reread the first twenty or so chapters of the manga Death Note, mostly to marvel again at the premise. Briefly: a Japanese god of death drops to Earth a magic book with the following property: that if you write someone’s name while visualizing their face … they will die. The book is found by a teenage boy; he is both earnest and sociopathic.

He begins to write names

In my estimation, the manga loses itself midway through its long run; they ought to have wrapped it up years earlier. But the opening chapters are a perfectly propulsive puzzle — a dazzling information game. Claude Shannon would have loved Death Note.

Here is a strange sort of virtual artifact: Francis Spufford’s unsanctioned Narnia novel, unpublished, unpublishable. And yet, it exists! And is titled The Stone Table, perfect! And he is Francis Spufford — who wrote Red Plenty, so, odds are, this new chronicle is wonderful

What do we do with this information? Do we break into Francis Spufford’s office?

RIP to Howard Weaver. I never met him in the flesh

I knew all about him: his work, his sensibility. He was an energetic journalist at the Anchorage Daily News, serving for many years as its editor before moving to California to become an executive at McClatchy, the regional chain.

This kind of newspaper person, with this kind of newspaper career, is gone now. That’s sad, because it was a good kind. I was never part of that world; I was too late, and anyway, I have the wrong temperament. I only heard stories.

What a thing, to be in the newsroom of a profitable city paper in America: mischief and earnestness, all wrapped up together, on top of the world.