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MALE SPEAKER: Hello everyone.
My name is [INAUDIBLE].
I work on the Privacy Team.
Thanks for coming to this Authors at Google Talk.
Let me tell you a little bit about our guest of honor today.
Robert Sloan grew up near Detroit
and likes to say that he now splits
this time between San Francisco and the internet.
He graduated from Michigan State with a degree in economics.
And from 2002 to 2012, he worked at Pointer, Current TV,
and Twitter.
At all these places his job always
had something to do with figuring out
the future of media.
The "New York Times" describes his recent bestselling
hit "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" as a rollicking
neo-Borgesian tale about an unemployed San Francisco web
designer who takes a job at a mysterious bookshop
only to find himself initiated into the unbroken spine,
a 500-year-old secret society of bibliophiles
on an unexpected collision course with Google.
Please join me in welcoming to Google Mr. Robin Sloan.
ROBIN SLOAN: Thank you.
It's good to be hear.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: So I think today you're
hoping to kick us off a little bit of a reading--
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
MALE SPEAKER: --some choice bits from your book.
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
MALE SPEAKER: And if anybody has any questions,
I think we're going to try to save those
to the end of the reading.
And you can use the mic here in the middle of the room.
ROBIN SLOAN: OK.
Well thank you.
Thank you for the kind introduction.
It's go good to be here.
For people who have read the book,
you know that Google features prominently into the plot.
And I've just finished up a little book tour
to commemorate the paperback release.
And I have to report that at every stop across the country,
people always ask, is Google really like that?
And I have to confess that it's not really.
And I tell them, I do say that the depiction in my novel,
my work of fiction, is definitely not
intended to be like documentary style.
I tell them, though, that is an affectionate exaggeration.
And I hope it sounds that way to you as well.
So since I'm here at Google, and since I just
had lunch in one of your many cafes,
I felt like I probably had to read this very short section
in which our narrator who's a web
designer-- an unemployed web designer-- who
works at a mysterious 24-hour bookstore,
he goes to the Google campus-- the fictional Google campus--
for the first time and he has lunch.
Wide walkways curve through the main campus.
There's a bike lane and Googlers ***
by on carbon fiber racers and fixed gears with battery packs.
There's a pair of gray beards on recumbents
and a tall do dude with blue dreadlocks pedaling a unicycle.
I reserved some time on the book scanner at 12:30,
Kat says, lunch first?
The Google mess hall comes into view, wide and low,
a white pavilion staked out like a garden party.
The front is open, tarp pulled up above the entryways,
and short lines of Googlers poke out into the lawn.
Kat pauses, squinting, calculating.
This one, she says finally, and tugs me over to leftmost line.
I'm a pretty good queue strategist,
but it's not easy here because everyone at Google
is a queue strategist, I suggest.
Exactly.
So sometimes there's bluffing.
Hey, this guy's a bluffer, she says,
jabbing the Googler just ahead of us in line with her elbow.
He's tall and sandy haired, and he looks like a surfer.
Hey, I am Finn, he says, holding out
a blocking long fingered hand.
Your first visit to Google?
It is, indeed, my ambiguously European friend.
I make small talk.
How's the food?
Oh fantastic.
The chef is famous.
He pauses.
Something clicks.
Kat, he must use the other line.
Right, I always forget, Kat says.
She explains our food is personalized.
It has vitamins, some natural stimulants.
Finn nods vigorously.
I am experimenting with my potassium level.
Now I'm up to 11 bananas every day.
Body hacking.
His face splits into a wide grin.
Wait.
Did the couscous salad have stimulants?
Sorry, Kat says, frowning.
The visitor line is over there.
She points across the lawn, and I leave her
with the body hacking euro surfer.
The food is as promised fantastic.
I get two scoops of lentil salad and a thick pink stripe
of fish, seven sturdy green lines of asparagus,
and a single chocolate chip cookie
that has been optimized for crispiness.
Kat waves me over to a table near the pavilion's perimeter
where a quick breeze is rustling the white tarp.
Little slices of light dance across the table which
has a paper covering marked out with a pale blue grid.
At Google, they eat lunch on graph paper.
This is Raj, she says, waving a fork full of lentil salad which
looks just like mine, at a skater
Ph.D. We went to school together.
Kat studied symbolic systems at Stanford.
Did everybody here go to Stanford?
Do they just give you a job at Google when you graduate?
When Raj speaks, he seemed suddenly
10 years older than his appearance.
His voice is clipped and direct.
So what do you do?
I hoped that question would be outlawed here, replaced
by some quirky Google equivalent like, what's
your favorite prime number?
I point at my badge and concede that I
work at a used bookstore, in other words,
the opposite of Google.
Ah, books, Raj pauses a moment chewing.
Then his brain slots into a groove.
You know, old books are a problem for us,
old knowledge in general.
We call it OK, old knowledge, OK.
Did you know that 95% of the internet
was only created in the last five years?
But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge,
the ratio is just the opposite.
In fact, OK, [INAUDIBLE] for most things
that most people know and have ever known.
Raj is not blinking and possibly not breathing.
So where is it, right?
Where's the OK?
Well it's in old books for one thing.
He uncaps a thin tipped marker.
Where did that come from?
And starts drawing on the graph paper tablecloth.
And it's also in people's heads, a lot of traditional knowledge.
That's what we call TK.
OK and TK.
He's drawing little overlapping blobs
labeling them with these acronyms.
Imagine if we could make all that OK TK available
all the time to everyone on the web, on your phone?
No question would go unanswered ever again.
I wonder what Raj has in his lunch.
Vitamin D, omega 3's, fermented tea leaves,
he says, still scribbling.
He makes a single dot off to the side of the blobs
and smooshes the marker down making the black ink bleed.
That's what we've got stored right now,
he says, pointing to the dot.
And just think how valuable that is.
If we get all this-- he sweeps his hand
across the OK TK blobs like a general planning conquest--
well if we could add all this, then
we could really get serious.
MALE SPEAKER: So I have to ask-- my first question would be,
who's your favorite character?
ROBIN SLOAN: My favorite character in the book is Kat.
And so for folks who have read the book, of course
you know who that is.
For folks who haven't, I'll explain
that she is an engineer.
She's actually a Googler.
She's the one who invites our protagonist to the campus
and sort of shows him around.
She's a designer.
She's into data visualization, but she's also
a programmer in her own right.
And over the course of the book, she
becomes more and more of a manager.
And she's basically a bad ***.
And she's my favorite character because I
used to work with Kat or many versions of Kat.
And as I read everything, contemporary fiction
and fiction of technology in it, and techno thrillers,
and all the rest, I noticed that Kat or this Kat archetype
was usually not present in these books.
And more and more I decided that I
wanted to do my tiny little part to help remedy that.
So I both like her as a character,
but I'm also proud to have kind of put
that person on the fiction shelf.
MALE SPEAKER: Do you feel like your book
is sort of filling in any other maybe things
that you felt were missing from the literary landscape?
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I'm someone who-- I worked at Twitter
for a few years and have always been fascinated
by the web and the internet.
And I mean, I really feel like I sort of grew up
as both a reader and a writer on the internet.
It's my native country, right?
I'm definitely a citizen of the internet.
And kind of combining that with all the experiences
that a person has in the Bay Area,
knowing people who work at Google, people
who work at Twitter, people who have started companies
of their own, I think you end up with a whole map of experiences
that are actually really interesting.
And I would say largely absent from contemporary fiction.
And whether that's just because most writers live
somewhere else or because of the old divide between left brain
and right brain or whatever it is, the more I read,
the more I kind of just sensed that the things that I
saw every day and thought were really interesting
were like not on the pages of the novels I was reading.
AUDIENCE: About that a little bit,
how was your transition from IT to being an author?
Are you a full-time right now?
And also when you're writing, what's your day to day?
How does it look like?
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
Good question.
Well I was actually explaining earlier,
so the Google office is nice of course.
Twitter's office was nice as well.
And I was happy to work in such a nice office.
Actually, I've worked at a bunch of companies
that were all wonderful places to work.
And I feel like that was helpful because I still
didn't like working in those offices.
And I figured if I didn't like those offices,
I wasn't going to like any offices.
So I have found the transition from-- it's
been less about tack to writing and more
about working in an office to working on your own.
And that's obviously a temperamental thing.
Everyone's different.
But I have found that totally copacetic.
But what it means is that my day to day routine
is I think actually pretty normal for a full-time writer.
I spend most of the day alone sitting
at my kitchen table just pecking away.
This might be useful folks who are
thinking about this themselves or maybe struggling with it,
I use a program that is very popular--
increasingly popular-- among writers called Freedom.
Anybody know this program Freedom?
It's great.
It's free to try.
It does one thing.
You open up the application, and it asks you
for a number of minutes.
And you type in-- in my case I usually type
in about 120 minutes.
You hit Return and it disables the internet on like a very--
[LAUGHTER]
ROBIN SLOAN: --on like a very low level.
This is not turning off your Wi-Fi.
If you want to turn it back on, you
have to restart your computer and just
feel like a failure in life.
So you don't.
So you just leave it off until it returns.
And so my day is mostly me undergoing
a sequence of internet deactivations.
What am I going to do?
I guess I'll work on this book.
AUDIENCE: I am fascinated by-- I'm
sort of the old school league.
You can tell by the gray hair.
It's because I'm old.
And I have many, many younger friends here.
And I love books on paper.
I discover a lot of people don't necessarily love books on paper
anymore.
They want them on their Kindle.
I probably have 4 or 5,000 books at home.
ROBIN SLOAN: Wow.
AUDIENCE: And I know some people who have none.
They have their Kindle.
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Could you speak a little bit
to the idea of the importance of bookstores
since your book is about a bookstore and that sort
of balance between paper and online?
ROBIN SLOAN: That's an awesome question.
Well, I will say one thing.
I think people who do one or the other are relatively rare.
That is, people who only have print books
and have never touched a digital book,
and conversely, people who have these entirely digital
libraries and have just abandoned physical books
entirely.
Especially for people who read a lot,
you find sort of a hybrid mode.
I think that's important.
People want to frame it as one versus the other.
And in fact, people read lots and lots of different contexts.
I think that's a good thing.
I will say that for me personally the pendulum
has kind of swung and then swung back,
of course, as digital books became available,
I read more on Kindles and phones and my laptop screen
and everything.
In the last couple years, it started to swing back.
I never gave up physical books.
But it started to swing back, and I
find that my default mode is physical books more often.
And here's my theory for why that is the case.
I think that physical books have a feature--
and I think it's important to call it
a feature it is like it should be compared to software
like bullet point by bullet point.
I really do think we should think about it that way.
And this is the feature.
They don't disappear.
I'm thinking of the books that I buy for my Kindle.
And I often buy things kind of aspirationally
or speculatively.
I'm like, I'll read that one day.
That looks good.
And it's there and it kind of hangs out.
But then, of course, it gets push down.
And once a book is past that first page on any
of these devices, it's basically gone.
I mean, it might as well be invisible.
Because you just don't sit down and scroll through and try
to remember that stuff.
Digital books are very quiet in that way.
They go they go quietly.
They don't even protest.
They're like, what about me?
Oh.
Never seen or heard from again.
Physical books have this wonderful feature.
They impose themselves.
They have this ability to literally stand up
for themselves and just take up a little bit of space
in the real world and sit on a shelf or in a pile or whatever
and remind you that they exist and remind you
that you were interested in them once.
And it sounds simple, maybe even simplistic,
but I actually think it's a very significant advantage,
especially in a time when our attention is being whipsawed
around and we're constantly getting distracted by things
and interested in new things to have this thing that
caught your eye once be able to just kind of like take up
some space and remind you of that moment is actually
a hugely valuable feature.
So I like print books more and more for that reason.
AUDIENCE: Sort of as social media
becomes bigger and a larger part of everyone's life,
I feel that it's also becoming a larger part of creators' lives
like writers, television writers, book writers, things
like that.
When you're writing a book or when
you're in your creative process, you
maintain a high availability or a high degree of availability
for your fans, right?
So do you think that influences your writing at all?
And beyond just you, do you see that having an impact
on literature as a whole for people that are still
out there writing novels?
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good question.
Wow.
That was a really good question.
I think that the most honest answer
is kind of the less satisfying one which
is that it's complicated, and I think
it really depends on the writer.
And all I mean by that is people often
talk about engaging with social media
as if it was one thing, like a binary switch.
You either do it or you don't.
When, of course, it's a whole spectrum.
I consider myself a pretty serious user
of Twitter and all this stuff.
There are people who just like make me look like a luddite.
Make me look like I'm like taking my horse drawn carriage
to and from the post office in the next state
because they're just on it and they're so intense.
And they're just having these conversations,
they're responding to everything.
They're inviting these conversations every day.
And so there's that end of the spectrum, which I think
has its own pleasures and can be productive in certain ways.
And then there's other ends of the spectrum.
Like I think of a few writers who I really admire who,
there's one in particular.
He's not a fiction writer.
He's a writer of nonfiction, a critic, and essayist name Sam
Anderson.
And his whole social media strategy
that he just tweets once a day and he
tweets the best sentence he read that day.
It's really cool.
And of course, his sentences are all fantastic.
You go an follow up on them.
This is going to sound not the way I want to sound
but it's perfect for his personal brand.
It is.
It's like the most Sam Anderson thing you could possibly
do, to put the focus on great sentences
and just leave it at that.
So anyways, that's a very long way of saying that I think it's
going to influence everyone's life and work differently.
And that's a good thing.
If it was one uniform effect, I think
that would be quite boring.
I do think that when people think about it influencing
the work itself it definitely can, of course it can.
Every input changes what you produce.
I do think that, man, when you sit down to write something
long and spend day after day after day alone at your kitchen
table with the internet off, I really think like to sustain
that, it's got to come from somewhere inside
and that's always going to be there,
even if there are these other little inputs,
these other things that are coming from email and Twitter
and the web and Facebook and Google+ and everything else.
I really do think that the largest part of it
is always going to be internal because if you don't have that,
then you wouldn't be sitting there at all.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to ask you a little bit about when
you knew that you had a book in front of you,
when you were like, OK, I'm going to quit my job
and focus on this full-time, or did you do it before when you
said I have this idea and I think I'm going to make it big?
And what that process was when at the point you said,
I have something.
ROBIN SLOAN: That's a great question.
Yeah, I'll tell you what happened to me.
It was a few things that were my own doing
and also some other things that kind of happened to me
or I got an assist from other people.
The story itself, the seed of the story,
was actually a short story that I published online years
ago back in 2009.
It was also called "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore".
And it started in the same way, and then it just kind of ended.
It was like there's a 24-hour bookstore.
That's interesting, the end.
[LAUGHTER]
There was a little more to it than that.
But it was very short, and I didn't
think there was going to be anything more to it.
I thought that was just one in a series of short stories
I'd been writing and publishing.
So there's a little bit of short sightedness there
and a bit of failure on my own part
to maybe recognize what I had.
Because the response to it was actually
quite a bit more significant than to anything else
I had written to date.
And in fact, greater than things I wrote even after that.
I continue to publish these little short stories.
And they did fine, but nothing got the same sort
of just strong sudden enthusiastic response
that this one did.
It took someone else to tell me that.
It was an agent that I ended up getting in touch with
and really hitting it off with.
And it was actually her counsel.
She said, you know, that story is really good
and there might be a bigger story there.
And I had not really considered that until that moment.
But as soon as she said it, it seemed
like it was probably right.
So that was still in the realm of speculation.
I had a short seed of a story that had been almost like
a prototype and it had been validated a little bit in a way
that some others hadn't.
And I now had the notion that it could be a full length novel,
but I didn't know exactly what to do with that notion.
I did have a full-time job at the time.
I would not have contemplated leaving my job just
to try to write this because at that time,
I had no evidence that I could actually finish a full length
novel.
I had never written anything that long.
I wasn't one of those people that
had three drafts in a drawer that they
had sort of written to practice.
So I just worked nights and weekends and holidays
and basically wherever I could fit it
in while I was working full-time.
And I emerged at the end of about a year
of that kind of work with a draft, a first draft.
And that's what I sent back to this agent.
And said, hey, what do you think?
You said this could be a full length novel, right?
And we started talking about it and editing it and making
it better.
And from that point, the process was, in many ways,
pretty traditional.
It was drafts and sending it to publishers,
and finding a publisher who liked it,
and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And it was after that, after I sold it, that I left my job.
But I would say that the two important pieces-- the really
important piece-- were one, having
a sense that I had the seed of something that was good
and that there were some validation associated
with that.
But the fact that it had been a short story first
and that this very smart person said like trust
me I've published a lot of books and I
think there's something here.
And then the other thing was just
being willing to do the work.
I was no fun for that year.
I didn't go anywhere or really see anyone
or form any additional human relationships or anything.
But that's how I did it.
AUDIENCE: So I read the short story
about three or four years ago--
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: --I loved it.
I thought it was amazing.
I didn't even know you made a book out
of it until I saw your name of the Authors calendar.
ROBIN SLOAN: Ha!
AUDIENCE: But I'm glad you're here.
And I'm glad I get to read the book.
So something I really liked about the short story,
so this question might be irrelevant
if people haven't read it, but the protagonist,
he never actually says anything in quotes.
Like he always kind of says stuff,
but it's never a direct quote.
And I really, really love that style.
And when I thumbed through the book,
I noticed he actually says stuff.
So I'm kind of curious, was that on purpose the first time?
And how did you transition into doing
it the other way for a full book?
ROBIN SLOAN: That is such a perceptive question.
That's like you're in the inner circle.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Like I said, I loved the short story.
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
No, that's fantastic.
No, you're absolutely right.
You're right.
This will be interesting to no one else in this room,
but I'm totally OK with that.
It was an intentional stylistic choice.
As both a reader and a writer, I have sometimes
found dialogue, especially very functional dialogue,
like what do you think, I don't know, OK, let's go,
to just be sort of like boring to read
and certainly boring to write.
That has a lot to say about my own skill
level and my own development as a writer as much as anything
else, but I definitely had that in my head
when I started writing the short story.
And so yes, it was very intentional.
I wanted you to never quite be sure
whether he was thinking something or saying it out
loud because I think sometimes we're not sure
if we're thinking something or saying it out loud.
And I actually think that there's
an interesting sort of malleability,
like the membrane between those two things
is actually thinner than we sometimes think,
or fiction would lead us to believe.
So that was the effect I intended.
And some people hated it, for the record.
I really liked it too.
But for the book, I still kept some of that,
but especially reading it at book length
and knowing that the reaction in some cases had been negative
or at least people had expressed confusion,
I didn't want to go with that style for the whole book.
So I guess you could say I capitulated to fiction
standards and put a few of his obviously stated
words in quotes.
But there's still plenty of the little things that
exist in that gray area between internal monologue
and dialogue.
Good to know.
Good data point because I like it too.
Maybe if I find enough people like you,
maybe I'll be brave enough to try
to write another whole story with that style.
AUDIENCE: So one quick question and one longer one.
Where do we find the short story?
Is it available online?
ROBIN SLOAN: It is available online.
It is free.
You can buy it, of course, if you
want to have it on your Kindle or just send me $3,
but it's free.
It's on my website.
I'm RobinSloan.com.
And it'll be there forever.
AUDIENCE: Great.
And the longer question is, I'm not
sure I should mention the surprise that I got when
I first was reading the book and turned off the light,
but could you say a little bit about how that happened?
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I spent some time looking
to see if there was a message there.
And I seemed to have missed it if there was.
ROBIN SLOAN: Yeah.
And since you asked, I have often
debated whether to reveal this or not.
I'll just go ahead and reveal it because maybe it
will help sell some books.
MALE SPEAKER: Spoiler alert.
ROBIN SLOAN: The spoiler alert.
The cover glows in the dark which is pretty cool.
And many people purchase the book not knowing that.
And truly, I've gotten some emails sent,
I think, late at night.
These are very contemporaneous reports
as people type I just woke up because I
had to go to the bathroom and something was glowing
and it was your book.
So I can't take any credit for it.
It was the design team at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
the original publisher.
In particular, the cover designer Rodrigo Corral,
who's one of the great book jacket
designers working right now.
And yeah, they pitched me the idea and I told them like,
are you kidding?
That sounds fantastic.
You do not have to twist my arm.
It has.
It's been a fun surprise for a lot of people.
And what was the other part of your question?
AUDIENCE: Well, is there a message?
ROBIN SLOAN: Oh, is there a message?
Because of course, there's a pattern
of sort of a geometric slightly abstracted pattern of books
on the cover.
The answer is I don't think so.
If there is, I'm not aware of it.
I will, to be totally candid, about two or three months
after the book came out, it occurred
to me for the first time, wait a minute, what is they
put a code in there?
What is they put a code and I don't know about it?
I've got to know if there's a code on my book!
So I did the same thing.
I kind of like counted them up.
I could not devive any meaning either.
So if there's a code, it is cunning indeed.
AUDIENCE: I'm relieved to hear that.
I spent some time [INAUDIBLE].
ROBIN SLOAN: And it is also not a code of my own design.
So see Rodrigo Corral, code master.
MALE SPEAKER: We've had sort of questions
about your characters and your stylistic choices.
One of the questions I have for you
is tell us a little bit about your writing style.
I mean, do you start with a detailed outline?
Or do you kind of let the story go where it will?
ROBIN SLOAN: You know, a little bit of both.
I feel like all my answers are a little bit of both.
It's complicated.
But it's true.
And I do start with a sense of what I'm doing.
I'm not one of those people who sets up a couple of characters
or a situation and then just says we'll see what happens.
Part of the fun of writing is finding out as you go.
There is some of that, of course.
You don't have everything kind of plotted out
like a schematic or a blueprint.
But certainly writing this book, I
did have some sense of what the puzzles were,
what the great kind of puzzle is lurking behind the scenes
or going to be.
More than anything else though, I tell you,
I feel like the thing that is really
the most central part of my process
is neither of those things.
It's not the organic kind of following the characters.
And it's also not that the schematic outline.
It's something else.
I actually don't know if this is particularly productive or not,
but it's my notes.
I'm a diligent note taker anytime
I run into anything weird or interesting
or something that just sticks in my brain,
you know some things just kind of seem to adhere somehow.
It could be the name of a street.
You know, you're driving, you see a street sign,
or it can be something you overhear in a coffee shop
or whatever.
I write all those things down.
And then I end up typing them into the computer.
And when I write, I almost always have that open
and I'm just kind of swimming in this soup of weird old stuff,
things that caught my eye at one point or another.
And often it's almost like building with LEGOs.
I don't know if you ever played with LEGOs
but I remember being a kid--
MALE SPEAKER: Too much.
ROBIN SLOAN: --yeah, I remember being a kid-- and part of it
is-- actually, I never thought of this metaphor
before but it's actually quite accurate.
You want to design something.
You want to build something with your LEGOs,
but then you're scraping through and you're kind of like, oh,
that's such an awesome piece.
And you find a way to make it part of the creation.
And so for me, writing is a lot like playing with LEGOs.
MALE SPEAKER: Like those little neon antennas from the sci-fi--
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
And the--
MALE SPEAKER: Is that in the pirate set?
ROBIN SLOAN: It was.
It was all the space pieces.
It was all the glowy space pieces.
Yes.
So a novel for me is an excuse to use all the glowy space
pieces.
Yeah.
That's right.
MALE SPEAKER: So can you tell us a little bit
about maybe your next writing project,
what you have coming up?
ROBIN SLOAN: Sure.
Well it's a two part answer.
The one that is right now, the one
that's kind of the newest thing is a short story prequel
to the novel.
It's called "Ajax Penumbra 1969".
It takes place in 1969.
And it is about how this man, who
would become Mr. Penumbra, how he arrived
in San Francisco, why he came here, what made him stay,
and what he saw along the way.
And there's a lot of fun period stuff,
especially for people who knew the Bay Area and San Francisco.
It's, I think, a lot of things that will make you
smile and just maybe people will learn a few things too
about the origins of BART and the origins of the internet
and the stuff buried beneath the city of San Francisco.
It's actually pretty crazy.
So that's out right now.
And it's available online.
And I know we have physical copies here
for folks in the room.
And I'm working on another novel as well-- another full length
novel that is nothing to do with bookstores, unfortunately.
Nothing to do with the world of Mr. Penumbra,
but it's a California book.
The story begins in the Bay Area.
There's a lot of technology in it, although sort
of a different kind of technology.
And this book is going to have a lot of food in it.
AUDIENCE: Going back to the previous question about sort
of your writing process, one of the things I really
liked when I read the book was how
you incorporated a lot of real world information
and events and books into it.
And I was wondering how that factored in
as you were writing.
ROBIN SLOAN: Sure.
That's a good question.
There's two parts there.
There's the books and there's all the other stuff.
And I have to say, writing a book about a bookstore
is like ultimate license to just stock it
with all your favorites.
So any title or author mentioned in this novel
is it's one of my favorite books.
And you can just interpret all of those mentions as me
kind of saying I bow down to the masters
and paying homage to the stuff that I've
read that just really made a difference
and made me want to write in the first place.
So there's that piece of it.
The other piece-- the sort of the bits
of our world, whether it's bits of software or real companies
like Google or real ideas that are
very much kind of in the air right now--
it relates to some of the things we've
already talked about such as the fact
that these things always seem present to me and very much
part of the world.
But I wasn't seeing them on the page of novels
and I wanted to remedy that.
I guess maybe the most accurate way to answer
is that I, as a reader, I read a lot of novels--
contemporary novels, a lot of science fiction--
and I have always appreciated the kind of novels that
seem to just like grab the Zeitgeist
and crystallize the moment that we're in right now.
I think of William Gibson as being
a writer who does this really well.
And Neal Stephenson when he decides he wants to
is also great at it.
There are plenty more.
But I love that.
I just love the feeling of reading a novel.
And It's almost like it's a lens and the world is getting
kind of collected and probably distorted it a little bit.
But then beamed right into your brain.
I just think it's one of the wonderful functions of fiction.
So I guess I wanted to do that.
They're my favorite kind of books.
So why not try to write your favorite kind of book?
And also, some of it was just inescapable
at-- to give you a concrete example,
when I worked at Twitter, I dabbled
a little bit with a software platform
called Hadoop-- this thing for sort of big data analytics.
I know Google has its own version of it,
or it is a version of something actually
that Google kind of originated.
But using it was so, to me, striking and interesting,
and literally kind of creates these strange new feelings
like unfamiliar feelings.
It felt very oracular to me to be
able to kind of like ask these questions
of this vast database.
And so having done that and having a fiction writer's
brain, literally, this could have been a novel
about like an 18th century whaling family.
And somehow, Hadoop would have been in it.
I don't know how that would have worked.
But there are these things that-- it goes back to the note
thing-- they just sticking in your craw.
And they're just kind of like glued into your brain.
And yeah, so that happens too.
MALE SPEAKER: What got glued into your brain
that kicked off the Mr. Penumbra storyline?
ROBIN SLOAN: Well I mean, here's the honest answer.
I wish it was way more epic than this.
I wish it was that I'd like wandered into some spooky
bookstore somewhere and then the next day it was gone.
In fact, it was a tweet.
It was not even my own tweet.
It was a tweet sent by a friend of mine years ago,
back in late 2008.
I remember very vividly exactly where I was when I read it.
I was walking down California Street near my neighborhood
out in the Richmond in San Francisco.
And her tweet said, just misread a sign for 24-hour book drop
as 24-hour bookshop.
My disappointment is beyond words.
Which seemed very reasonable to me.
I would have been disappointed as well.
And I don't know, it just made me laugh.
It made me think about 24-hour bookstores
and what a terrible and wonderful idea
a 24-hour bookstore would be.
And more than anything else, it just stuck in that way
we've been talking about.
And so I copied it down, paste it into my notes
file, which got transmitted back to the big sort
of central repository on my computer.
And a few months later when I was sitting down
to start a new short story, I saw it there near the top.
And it just seemed clear to me that something interesting
would happen in a 24-hour bookstore.
But if not for that tweet, in late 2008,
it would have been 18th century whalers all the way.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I really like the book.
And what were some of your favorite books?
ROBIN SLOAN: Oh, that's the hardest question of all.
That's terrible.
What a burdensome question.
There's too many to list.
I will say, so I have to split my sort of response
into two streams.
One is because this novel is very much a quest,
and of course, it itself pays homage
to every YA fantasy series with dragons or elves in it.
Of course, those are still some of my favorites.
I don't know if people have read "The Chronicles of Prydain"
by Lloyd Alexander.
Still love those. "The Dark Is Rising" by Susan Cooper.
Slightly, slightly less well known,
but I think a nearly perfect YA sort of fantasy series.
"The Dragonlance Chronicles" by Margaret Weis
and Tracy Hickman.
There's a character in the novel who met his best friend back
in sixth grade because he spied him
reading this book across the room.
And I have a friend who I've known since sixth grade
because I spied him reading "The Dragonlance Chronicles"
across the room and I was like, we should probably be friends.
On the other side, though, there's
a lot of science fiction that I love.
The stuff that I find myself responding to most strongly
right now, like really at this moment,
is stuff that is sort of science fiction and sort
of not, stuff that maybe blurs the boundary between science
fiction and literary fiction.
And there's a writer, just to name
one-- I could go on and on-- but to pick one,
there's a writer named M. John Harrison who's British.
He's been writing for a long time.
But his latest books form a trilogy-- sort
of a loose trilogy.
The first one's called "Light".
One's called "Nova Swing".
The third is called "Empty Space".
And I mean, I think they belong on the literary fiction shelf.
But at the same time, they're spaceships and quantum physics
and weird adventures in lost nebulaes.
And it's fantastic stuff.
It's just like truly, truly awesome writing.
AUDIENCE: So speaking of trilogies,
the sort of goes to do authors feel
an obligation to their readers.
After I read the book, and I read it maybe six months ago,
I went to Amazon to read reviews,
which is always kind of fun.
And one common thread seemed to be, gosh, I wish it was longer
or gosh I can't wait until the next one comes out.
So the prequel is a delight.
But like when one comment I remember is
people are going gosh, what happened with Kat?
What happened to the relationship
between Kat and the main character?
Do you have any interest or do you feel any quotes obligation
towards your readers to finish that story?
ROBIN SLOAN: That's such an interesting question.
It's actually a huge question and weighs so much more
on other frankly far more successful and established
writers than me.
I think when you're just starting out, happily,
there's just not that many people reading yet.
And so maybe not that sense of gravity.
I think of stories I've heard of George RR Martin's fans.
Whenever he does anything like he watches a football
or like writes an episode of the TV show, they're like,
what do you think you're doing?
Get back to work.
Which is just wrong in so many ways.
I don't know.
I don't know if I have a good answer to that
as I don't think I've experienced that yet myself.
And it would, obviously, be a privilege to experience that.
I think you have to meet people halfway though.
Nobody wants writers, readers most of all
don't want writers to just be story making machines, kind
of responding to every little kind of whim and preference.
It's robotic and it's boring.
And it doesn't produce the work that paradoxically
inspires that kind of devotion.
So there has to be some independence
and some sense of I'm a do my thing.
But on the other hand, I also don't
believe in locking yourself away.
Let me put it this way.
If I get enough emails from people clamoring for more, then
maybe I'll consider it.
I've only gotten a few so far.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you so much for joining us, Robin.
ROBIN SLOAN: Thank you so much for your [INAUDIBLE].
Thank you all.
[APPLAUSE]