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. 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.) So you have a beginning, I say-again, to myself, off in who-knows-where. But you'll need to do one more thing. You'll need to establish, high up, that Sloan loves going meta. Does it constantly.
Denne historien er fra September - October 2024-utgaven av WIRED.
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Denne historien er fra September - October 2024-utgaven av WIRED.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.
