(2024-04-22) Sloan You Could Extinguish A Star

Robin Sloan: You could extinguish a star. As a reader, I’m skeptical of attempts to pin sensory experience to the page. The “better” the descriptive language, it seems to me, the more it actually obscures the experience

There’s a balance, of course, between (1) the literary backflip and (2) the cliché so dull it makes you doubt the writer experienced anything at all.

This is all to say: the experience of a total solar eclipse is unsayable, impossible to capture.

The total eclipse (I have learned) is not “an image in the sky” but “a process in the world”.

For a long time, I’ve cultivated a personal theory of naming. It goes like this: When you name something, you label the thing; frame it. This is an important job, before anyone has actually encountered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. (naming things)

So, when naming something, while it’s important to choose an appealing label, it’s probably more important to choose a vessel of sufficient capacity.

This is why the names Star Wars and Star Trek, both of which are objectively stupid, have been so successful: their very blandness leaves them capacious.

In retrospect, I believe the title I chose for my second novel, Sourdough, did get in the way.

I had all of this in mind when I was naming this new project. I’d collected several candidates, and I liked them all, but only as the titles of standalone novels.

That limitation sent me hunting, and my hunt delivered me to Moonbound, which I think is terrific.

I feel totally insulated: because if it’s actually stupid, that’s fine. In fact, stupid might be better, because that means it’s an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with everything that bursts out of this book, and the books to come.

I’ve read superhero comics for most of my life, but never with the intensity of my early teens. This was during the great comic book speculation bubble of the 1990s;

There’s a story from the comics of that era that never left me.

To begin: two of the X-Men get married!

Soon, they have a son.

The child is captured by one of the X-Men’s greatest foes, who infects him with a techno-organic virus that begins to transform his living cells. Soon, it will turn him into a sort of techno-zombie; think of the Borg, from Star Trek.

A friendly emissary from the distant future indicates that, in her time, the child can be saved. She can take him, but it will be a one-way trip. His parents will never see him again.

In the future, the child is trained to apply his mutant powers to his own body, using telekinesis to hold the techno-organic virus in check.

every iota of those powers, every scrap of that gift, will be consumed by the task before him. The ally explains that living with the virus “will mean sacrificing your other abilities”—the ones we just heard about — “[and] literally fighting on a cellular level every day of your life, making sure you live to see the next dawn.”

The boy grows up, and although his mutant powers are fully occupied, his normal body and brain are free to develop. He becomes a soldier, crafty and formidable — a sort of futuristic Odysseus. His codename is Cable.

There’s lots more to it — decades of narrative embroidery; a surfeit of clones — but this is the core: “You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.

Isn’t poverty the techno-organic virus

Isn’t your crappy diet the techno-organic virus

Isn’t the post-1970s politics of the U.S. the techno-organic virus

even beneath such a burden: life continues. Buoyed by fantastic powers within.

I really do believe the United States is a mutant marvel

Only a country of incredible capacity could have made it so far, so successfully, through bullshit so dense.

There’s another story here, significantly less resonant but still noteworthy, about how this particular comic book character started out pretty stupid, then became more and more interesting, thanks to layers of creativity and humanity added by different writers and artists over time.

Here is a short piece I wrote for the Atlantic about my favorite subject. I didn’t go deep on this in the Atlantic piece, because I am not a pro wrestling expert, or even that much of a fan, BUT, AND, I do love the “heel turn”: the way a wrestler (like The Rock) will become a villain, with grace and glee, for the sake of the larger story. (see old (2018-09-12) Sloan Proposal Book Movie President TheRock)

Here is the 21st-century ice cream truck! I love the lightness of this approach — it runs on text messages, without any cumbersome app

I believe the Financial Times is the world’s best newspaper. The name is a bit of a fake out, these days; the paper ranges widely beyond finance, with an outlook that is expansive and liberal, in every sense. The FT was the first newspaper to add CLIMATE as a top-level section: a stake in the ground.

A recent edition of The Animation Obsessive discusses the dynamics of Don Bluth’s departure, along with many other animators, from Disney.

Bluth started a side project. An independent cartoon made with independent equipment. In his garage.... took over his whole Culver City home. Guedel recalled that Bluth “literally lived with only his own single bed and a dresser in his small bedroom”—every other space “was filled with animation equipment.”