(2023-04-05) Sloan How To Build A Spaceship

Robin Sloan: How to build a spaceship. As many of you know, I’m in a band with Jesse Solomon Clark, called The Cotton Modules. About eighteen months ago, we released our first album, the product of a hybrid human/AI collaboration. Our forth­coming release, titled The Greatest Remaining Hits, is a sci-fi concept album. But this newsletter isn’t about the album, which won’t arrive until May. It’s about the spaceship!

I’ve written a new short story, which we’ll publish alongside the songs. The important thing to know, for now, is that it’s about the voyage of the Deep Space Sloop John Bethel.

At some point, Jesse and I decided we ought to actually build this spaceship

We basically followed this video from Adam Savage step-by-step.

It was the next step that had, for me, motivated the whole project. Any sci-fi nerd of a certain depth and/or vintage knows about GREEBLING, the technique ubiq­ui­tous in movie model shops — like the fabled Indus­trial Light and Magic — for adding visual interest to a plain, smooth model. The technique is: buy a bunch of old model kits and bash them together!

Adam Savage had assured us that a single coat of gray primer would pull every­thing together: a sudden, snapping suspen­sion of disbelief.

scroll back! Look again at the box of white plastic we started with. Isn’t it cool to know THAT thing is THIS thing? Doesn’t the gap between the real and the imaginary produce a tremen­dous crackle of energy?

This connects to the way Jesse and I use AI, too. For us, the tech­nology doesn’t make anything faster, easier, or simpler. Far from it: AI makes our produc­tion slower, more difficult, more complex. We put up with it because the results are consis­tently surprising and evocative.

That’s one of the arguments embedded in this album: AI in art — in music, specifically — shouldn’t be about effi­ciency and automation. It should be (just like every other tool and technique) about making new oper­a­tions possible, and producing sounds you’ve never heard before. (generative)

Playing Shakespeare was a minis­eries first broadcast in, I think, 1982. The host is John Barton, a longtime director and teacher at the Royal Shake­speare Company; the setting is a stage, after hours, with Barton surrounded by a coterie of actors who are, at the time of this recording, not yet global superstars: Ian McKellen. Ben Kingsley. Judi Dench. Patrick Stewart!

The first episode is the one that hooked me. It’s about how Shake­speare’s elevated language interacts with the modern tradition of natu­ral­istic acting. The discus­sion is brainy, humane, expansive, inviting

There’s a connec­tion between this newsletter and the previous edition ((2023-03-08) Sloan How The Ring Got Good), its inves­ti­ga­tion into Tolkien’s revisions of The Lord of the Rings. They are both connected, in turn, to my new novel, currently being reviewed by my editor at MCD. The connec­tion is worldbuilding, because I’ve done more work of this kind — with this feeling — for the new novel than for anything I’ve ever produced before.

mapmaking and terrain-shaping and, yes, even a bit of Tolkien-esque language invention. Before the book arrives, I’d like to produce some drawings, too.

If you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said this kind of work was mostly procrastination. For the Robin of a decade ago, that was true. Now, with deeper confi­dence and expanded ambition, I can make time and space for these explo­rations without getting derailed.