(2020-07-31) Sloan A Ransom Note

Robin Sloan: Aransom note. Each day, the detective Annabel Scheme held her ground on the front page. ((2020-06-09) Sloan Serialized Mystery The Strange Case Of The New Golden Gate Chapter1) I’ve now collected, revised, and expanded that story, which is novella-length, and produced a digital edition, available to all. I’d like to ask for your help releasing it.

I’m offering the digital edition for $9, which is a bit steep for a novella, but I want the price to communicate the sense that this isn’t a normal transaction; it’s something richer. I’ve set my goal at 1000 patrons, but the number of readers will be much larger. Here’s why: if we reach that goal, I’ll make the web edition of this Annabel Scheme adventure free for everyone to read.

Bit of a ransom note, isn’t this

The author and publisher Anne Trubek’s newsletter Notes from a Small Press is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in books and publishing—and I mean like, really publishing: moving books through the world

The other day I was listening to China Miéville (China Mieville) talk about his book October, a narrative history of the Russian Revolution in 1917

I have a theory that all good short stories are, in some sense, about death. This isn’t true for good novels, which can be about lots of things. Have I written short stories about death? I’ve tried

Once, I was commissioned to write a short story for a giant corporation. It was about a brilliant, high-tech city, and a very old woman who’d made a happy home there, and the last day of her life. I sent my first draft off to the corporation, and the notes came back: Great, love it. One thing, though… can she not die? Corporations, deathless, have a hard time with this.

There are books neither new nor old. The world has shifted beneath their feet, but not enough for them to have historical value

I found one: a dense volume called Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman. Written in 1999, it prefigures the power of the tech platforms—their particular flavor of power, I mean—twenty years ahead of time

Bauman is after bigger fish than tech platforms. This is a book about economics, politics, culture—everything. I’m midway through, highlighting basically every other paragraph. I read a fair amount of material like this, but/and, for me, Liquid Modernity stands apart: the kind of book that convinces you again that YES, you really CAN feel the little webs of electricity crackling across your brain as you turn the pages.

I think the whole 21st century might be coiled up inside this sentence: We feel rather than know (and many of us refuse to acknowledge) that power (that is, the ability to do things) has been separated from politics (that is, the ability to decide which things need to be done and given priority) …

I have to confess that I got a huge kick out of the teaser trailer for the TV series based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (Asimov Foundation). It’s not too late to get in on the ground floor with Foundation, which is, I believe, one of the key documents of midcentury modernity, insisting on the ultimate calculability of the world. (Zygmunt Bauman, discussed above, would call this “solid modernity.”) It’s a good series to read critically: noticing its assumptions and omissions even as you enjoy its sweep (huge) and tone (dorky).