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" 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. "
Robin Sloan
History
Want
You
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" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Digital
Side
You
" 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.' "
Robin Sloan
Week
School
Library
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Moment
Experience
Losing
" The stimulation I get from my phone does not feel like the opposite of boredom to me. It actually feels like a different flavor of boredom... a twitchier flavor. And sometimes, it's almost more irritation than stimulation. It's an itch. "
Robin Sloan
Boredom
Phone
Sometimes
" 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
More
" It's not like 'Print versus Digital - only one will survive.' We live in a hybrid world now, and I think the near-term future is also hybrid. "
Robin Sloan
Live
Future
Now
" People tend to think of the quest as a sort of fanciful or fantastical form, but actually, I think it's pretty realistic. I think that story of gathering allies to your side - recruiting your band of companions - actually matches the shape of most great careers, most great lives. "
Robin Sloan
Story
Side
People
" Selling books is hard to engineer. "
Robin Sloan
Engineer
Selling
Hard
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Who
Internet
Know
" You can really find yourself at sea when you're becoming an adult and suddenly have to feed yourself for the first time. "
Robin Sloan
Find
First
Sea
" You can go as far back as fifth grade, and you will find me tinkering with media and computers, making things that are a little off the beaten track. "
Robin Sloan
Back
Find
Me
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Sit
You
Now
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Reading
Today
Writing
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Disappear
Amazing
Books
" 'Minecraft' is a game about creation, yes. But it is just as much a game about secret knowledge. "
Robin Sloan
Creation
Yes
Knowledge
" I liked the sort of YA classics. I loved 'The Chronicles of Narnia.' I loved 'The Chronicles of Prydain' by Lloyd Alexander, who is amazing. Basically, 'Chronicles of' - I was in. "
Robin Sloan
Loved
Amazing
Classics
" When I'm using the Internet, I have 25 tabs open, and even if somebody sends me... something interesting, odds are I'll forget about it, or it'll get kind of lost in the shuffle. "
Robin Sloan
Me
Forget
Interesting
" Books and technology are braided together and always have been. "
Robin Sloan
Together
Always
Books
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Best
Today
Broken
" In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan. "
Robin Sloan
Public
Michigan
Some
" When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the Internet, but not the Internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the World Wide Web existed, it wasn't generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn't have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web. "
Robin Sloan
Internet
World
Time
" I think that some of the archetypes and works of science fiction that have pierced pop culture and stayed there are the darker ones and the dystopias. "
Robin Sloan
Science
Think
Science Fiction
" 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
Like
Way
Brain
" Social systems have values - arguments baked into their design. For example, Twitter's core argument seems to be, 'Everything should be public, and messages should find the largest audience possible.' Snapchat's might be, 'Communication should be private and ephemeral.' "
Robin Sloan
Design
Argument
Communication
" I've never believed that Things Should Continue As They Are. "
Robin Sloan
Should
Things
Never
" 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. "
Robin Sloan
Feel
People
Thoughtful
" We're looking at dozens, sometimes hundreds of things every day in articles, videos, and we never look at them again. Even if we do like them, even if we tweet them out to all of our followers on Twitter, we don't return to it. "
Robin Sloan
Look
Every Day
Day
" A gift shouldn't feel like homework. "
Robin Sloan
Like
Feel
Gift
" 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
Like
" 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
Am
Window