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" For so long, the model for writing has been, you sit in a room alone for a number of days or weeks or months or years and figure it out. But now, you don't have to do that; you don't have to be alone in the room anymore. "

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" You can really find yourself at sea when you're becoming an adult and suddenly have to feed yourself for the first time. "

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" Books are anchored. You return to books. You don't return to a tweet. "

Robin Sloan

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Anchored

" It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways - and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways. "

" When MUDs appeared, that was an entirely novel experience, and often an addictive one. Long before Twitter or Snapchat, MUDs inspired the moral panic of the moment: a 1993 'Wired' article titled 'The Dragon Ate My Homework' described university students losing themselves in these virtual worlds. Keep in mind: they were just words on a screen. "

" There's just no escaping it: The half-life of media on the Internet is super short. Tweets flow and fade; pages that look great today will be gone or, at best, riddled with broken links and outmoded code in five years, tops. "

" Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness. "

" A gift shouldn't feel like homework. "

Robin Sloan

Feel

Gift

" I think, personally - I don't know if other readers would agree - but reading 'Penumbra,' I detect an Internet writer or a writer who came up on the Internet. "

" You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore. "

" For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was 'D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.' "

" I think one of the most exciting things about the whole digital side of publishing is that it eventually allows you to operate at any length. That also means shorter stuff, too. "

" If you come from the Internet, as I do - I think of it as sort of my native country - there's a lot of great things happening on the Internet, but one of the things, one of the feelings you just can't escape is the sense that it's really hard to keep people's attention. "

" There's certainly satire written about techies, but it's so snarky and snide and doesn't treat him as a whole person. The people I worked with at Twitter - they're very analytical, but they're also deep and thoughtful - I feel like they deserved a charismatic spokesperson. "

" A lot of folks focus on using Twitter as a marketing tool. They'll have a bump that says something like 'Tweet about the NewTeeVee show! Use the hashtag #newteevee.' And that's great - folks should definitely do that. What gets us really excited, though, is when they go an extra step and start to transform tweets into TV content. "

Robin Sloan

Focus

Step

" In the case of 'Fish,' I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I'd change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on. "

" In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan. "

" Primes seem to me to be these unarbitrary, unique, fated things. It cannot be coincidence that the mythical numbers of storytelling like 3, 7, and 13 are random. The lower-end primes have incredible resonance in fiction and art. "

Robin Sloan

Unique

Art

" If I look into my past, I was definitely into inventors. I was into stories of Edison and Tesla and da Vinci and all these guys making stuff in their garage. "

" Baking and coding involve using the same parts of your brain and a lot of the same skills, like being able to follow directions or create directions in a very systematic way. "

Robin Sloan

Way

Brain

" Whether it's 'Fish' or 'Annabel Scheme' or 'The Truth About the East Wind,' I often find myself crafting custom containers to hold the kind of content I want to create. "

" When you close a tab or when you finish an article on the web, it's gone unless you go back into your history or search for it or explicitly try to find it. Apps on your phone have this special property: they hang around. In some ways, they're more like a book on a bookshelf than they are like web pages. "

Robin Sloan

You

Phone

" Without science fiction, without the influence these books have had on me over the years, I'm not sure I would care much about reading or writing today. "

" When you do something a little bit extreme or weird, it helps make it more interesting and more amenable to being written about. "

Robin Sloan

Interesting

Little

" If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside. "

Robin Sloan

I Am

Window

" I am comfortable combining the old and the new. "

" When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination. "

" This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it. "

" Print books have an amazing superpower because they don't disappear when you're done with them. Books on the shelf remind you that they exist. "

" Doing research for 'Penumbra,' I read quite a bit about the early history of printing, and the more I did, the more it sounded like... the Internet today. There was crazy competition and upheaval; there were constant arguments about new techniques, new materials, new machines; and, of course, there were fortunes to be made. "

" Books and technology are braided together and always have been. "