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" 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

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" Selling books is hard to engineer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We range widely, we readers of fiction, but I think we all need a home. Mine is science fiction. It's my home shelf, my homeland, my home planet, my essential genre. "

" 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. "

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

Robin Sloan

You

Anchored

" What is a game like 'No Man's Sky,' really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that's inert without the trigger of human attention. "

" I was always a computer kid, and I grew up with the Internet and always found it fascinating. "

Robin Sloan

Always

Kid

" A gift shouldn't feel like homework. "

Robin Sloan

Feel

Gift

" I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Good writing is really meaningful, and it's one of the - it's still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people's attention. "

" When you've biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems, frankly, pretty absurd. "

" 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. "

" My parents live in northern Michigan, and every year, in the summer, we visit them for a few weeks. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" Prediction just means you saw where the world might be going: ho-hum. Influence, though - ah. Influence, direct and acknowledged, means you actually steered the world, even if only a tiny bit. "

" 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

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

" 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

" I want to learn to weld. "

Robin Sloan

Want

Learn

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page. "

" 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've never believed that Things Should Continue As They Are. "

" 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

Forget

Interesting