Deep into my many-hour hang with the tech world’s greatest living novelist, Robin Sloan, he says something profound about science fiction. It’s the insight I’ve been waiting for, the key to understanding not just him but maybe all of storytelling. I glance down at my voice recorder, just to make sure it’s on. “Memory is full!” it says.
Full! With that mocking little exclamation point. I do not panic. Instead what happens is: I simply go insane. Part of me stays there with Sloan, chatting about sci-fi. The rest of me is, I don’t know how else to put this, yanked, as if by some cosmic cartoon cane, offstage, into the other-dimensional wings of reality, where time is irrelevant and space sort of fizzles. In that realm, I know my task: to come up with a way to write this profile, or perish.
It’s fine, I say to myself. Everything is fine. So what if you don’t have Sloan’s exact words? You can paraphrase. And you won’t even need to do that, at least not at first. In the intro paragraph, just say there IS a profound insight. Classic way to entrap the reader.
Well, unless the reader doesn’t know who Robin Sloan is and might not care about his ideas. But that’s an easy fix too. Just give him some impressive-sounding title that can’t be ignored. “The quintessential Bay Area author,” say—but less local. Or “the programmer-writer’s programmer-writer”—but less esoteric. Oh, that’s it: He’s “the tech world’s greatest living novelist.”
(Which is, maybe, actually perfectly true. How many other novelists do you know who live in the Bay Area, and used to work at Twitter, and have extremely nerdy websites, and code for fun? And don’t techies love his stuff? People book-clubbed his first two books everywhere. By default or not, Sloan’s the greatest we’ve got.)
So you have a beginning, I say—again, to myself, off in who-knows-where. But there’s one more thing you’ll need to establish. It’s probably the very thing you’re talking to Sloan about right now, back in the everyday world. Which is the fact that: the man loves going meta. Does it constantly. Said once: “The very best movies are about movies, the very best books about books.” You’ll need to say that Sloan’s first book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, was indeed a book about books. And that his new one, Moonbound, is a story about a hero playing out a very familiar tale—so, a story about stories (and narrated by a far-future descendant of the sentient sourdough starter from his second book, Sourdough).
Because what this’ll do is, it’ll convince the reader this isn’t fraudulent. Or indulgent. Or some pathetic and elaborate excuse for reporterly negligence. It couldn’t possibly be any of those things! It’ll be so much more: a profile about writing a profile: in the self-aware style of the person being profiled. It’ll loop. It’ll layer.
Or it will spiral into unreadable oblivion. There’s only one way to find out.
By the time I come to, I don’t know where I am. Sloan and I were at a restaurant, one of his favorites, a Taiwanese spot near his office in Berkeley. Now we’re walking outside, and it’s getting dark. I check my watch. I seem to have lost 30 minutes.
Whatever, I’m back in my body now, and I want to share my revelations. I tell Sloan that any piece I write about him will probably be a piece about writing a piece about him, and who cares if the voice recorder stopped recording, because—well, wait a sec. “Shouldn’t the profile also be, centrally, about the fact that the recorder stopped working?” I ask. Sloan giggles and agrees.
And as long as we’re on the subject, I say, there’s always that moment in a profile where the writer needs to describe the physical appearance of the person being profiled. “Maybe it’d be even more meta,” I suggest, “if you describe yourself for me?” He thinks for a moment and says: “I mean, he’s tall, obviously.” “And,” he adds later, “bald.”
This man is, I must say, terrific company—goofy, game for anything, touchy-feely. If he’s an old-fashioned tech bro, he’s the all-are-welcome kind, and not terribly full of himself. When he tells me, for instance, that he was into large language models three or four years before the AI band got cool, he’s quick to shrug and roll his eyes, which absolves him of any appearance of toolishness. (Unless, and this is a big unless: You don’t buy into this particular hackish quirk of self-awareness, wherein the mere acknowledgement that something semi-shady’s going on is enough to protect one from criticisms of it.)
So, inevitably, we talk a lot more, and meta-ly, about language, words, meaning—though Sloan doesn’t think it was inevitable that language would be the breakthrough AI technology. Could’ve been vision, he says; could’ve been something else. But now that it is language, and now that it can write, he’s excited to be the kind of writer the machines are not. Just take a look at Moonbound, which comes out today and is Sloan’s first proper work of science fiction. He thinks it’s his best-written, most human-sounding book so far—by far. It’s certainly his most ambitious: thematically, characterologically, even punctuationally. I point out his creative devotion, in it, to colons: and he launches into a defense of sentences that contain not one but two: which ChatGPT, of course, would never.
Earlier that day, at a nearby salvage yard, in a section devoted to hundreds of old doors, Sloan told me about the various paths his writing life could’ve taken. (Surrounded, I repeat, by doors. Sliding doors. Narrow doors. Glass doors. Meta doors, metaphors.) Back in 2010, the same year he started at Twitter, Sloan self-published three short stories on his website: one fantasy, one sci-fi, and one set in modern-day San Francisco. The one that happened to take off—and then formed the basis of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which came out two years later, shortly after Sloan left Twitter—was the nominally realist one. So he thought, for a time, that that’s the kind of writer he was. Sourdough, which followed five years after that, in 2017, was also set in SF. He gave a talk at Google somewhere in there, became kind of a thing in these parts, beloved by literate techies who saw in him a writer who understood both the incredible happening-ness of tech culture and how to novelize it.
I use the phrase “nominally realist” because: Sloan never entirely qualified. Penumbra’s gets pretty technomystical about books and history and the power of Google. The climax of Sourdough involves a massive bread monster at a futuristic food fair (a few years before the baking craze of the Covid era). There were, in other words, sci-fi stories in both books straining to break free. In Penumbra’s, multiple characters are literally reading books about dragons, and there’s a scene in which one character challenges another to imagine a sci-fi story set many thousands of years in the future.
Moonbound is set many thousands of years in the future, and there are a number of dragons in it. There are also wizards, talking beavers, sentient swords. Sloan’s hero, Ariel de la Sauvage (a “dorky name,” Sloan writes; it’s self-awareness all the way down) is an orphan boy who lives in a castle and is destined to pull a sword from a stone. “I knew this story,” says the AI narrator, but “it was different-shaped here, compressed and remade.” It loops. It layers.
Is it science fiction? Sloan certainly thinks so. “Hard” sci-fi, he insists, because everything in it is theoretically possible. The narrator, which calls itself a chronicler, was born many thousands of years ago; its great-great-great-grandLLMa was basically ChatGPT (plus a sourdough starter, sexy). But Moonbound is pure fantasy too: a compressed and remade King Arthur. To prepare for writing it, Sloan studied the masters: Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, Studio Ghibli. It shows, down to the moments in the story when he name-drops some of those influences. Moonbound reads, fairly irresistibly, like a science fiction novel written as a fantasy novel, or maybe vice versa, about how both genres are maybe the same genre. If it sells well enough, Sloan says, two sequels are planned, the second of which will go to outer space.
Sloan insists that none of this recursive insanity was in the stars when he wrote Penumbra’s more than a decade ago. A fastidious note-taker, he even has proof that the germ of the idea that became Moonbound was written down two years after Penumbra’s came out. I don’t buy any of it, I tell him; nothing is linear, at least when it comes to the formless realms of artistic creation. It’s no accident, I think, that Moonbound’s narrator creates for itself just such a place: a timeless place out of place in which to come up with ideas, or perish.
On the other hand, we’re all biased toward linearity, plot, chronology—Sloan, me, possibly even LLMs. In Moonbound, the AI chronicler asks a single linear-minded question, again and again and again, for centuries. It haunts the pages of the book, just as it seems to haunt Sloan’s head, and most of our time together. Maybe it haunts all of us, all the time. The question is, naturally:
What happens next?
It’s much later that night. I’m back at home now, mildly stoned, trying to watch a new sci-fi blockbuster. I can’t concentrate on it. Something’s bothering me.
I pause the movie and think. I’ve just spent an entire evening with the tech world’s greatest living novelist, Robin Sloan, and my voice recorder failed me at the most important moment. But that’s fine. It’s more than fine. Because I have a plan to write my way around that. I already did write my around that.
So what am I worried about? The ending? All I’ll need to do is deliver on the promise of the beginning and finally reveal the—
Ohhh. The profound insight. Yes. So that’s what’s bothering me. My memory. It’s too full! I have, I mean to say, in all the self-reassurances and self-congratulations of the self-strategizing of the foregoing many hours, completely forgotten what Sloan’s profound insight was. The thing I’m supposed to be building to. Gone.
Yank.
But I have been here before. I don’t panic.
Your profile will now be better than ever, I tell myself. Stupidly genius! Because now that the profound insight on which its entire existence depends does not exist, it’ll be—as it was perhaps always intended to be—a meta commentary, in real-ish time, about the question of going meta in the first place.
And isn’t this true to your time with Sloan? At one point hadn’t you even mounted, straight to his face, an entire case against self-awareness? Hadn’t you called it a cheat and a cover-up, tedious and college-dorm-y, the thing you do when you don’t have anything else to offer, all the while convincing yourself you’re really very clever? Hadn’t Sloan heard you out, and then completely, jovially, as is his way, disagreed? Hadn’t he then said (and you’ll paraphrase, obviously): The more we read books, or watch movies, or look at paintings, whatever, the more we understand those art forms as forms; and therefore, art that is about its existence as an art form is the highest form of art?
Yes. He said that. You will say that. You will write this profile. It will spiral into oblivion, and that will be the point.
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