Trespassers!
As a reader, I’m skeptical of attempts to pin sensory experience to the page. The “better” the descriptive language, it seems to me, the more it actually obscures the experience. That’s obviously true when the language is flowery, but I believe it’s also true when the language is ultra-precise — so “perceptive” as to be show-offy. Notice me, noticing this.
There’s a balance, of course, between (1) the literary backflip and (2) the cliché so dull it makes you doubt the writer experienced anything at all. Writers seek that balance — I seek it, sometimes — and they miss it, and that’s okay; that’s the game.
This is all to say: the experience of a total solar eclipse is unsayable, impossible to capture. It blazes across every sensory channel. There’s sight and hearing, sure, but also time and temperature. Is boredom a sense? Anticipation? There’s cosmic proprioception: the powerful awareness of your position in space.
I mean, the shimmering photos are gorgeous … but, having now experienced the real thing, I understand that they do not depict a total eclipse. Not at all.
The total eclipse (I have learned) is not “an image in the sky” but “a process in the world”. That’s a cool and precious thing, here and now in the 21st century. In its shocking recalibration of scale, in its megabandwidth saturation of the senses, “see eclipse” might be the ultimate expression of “touch grass”.
After totality, my nephew, age 10, said it best: “I feel bad for the gamers.”
As usual, this newsletter has a few distinct parts. Here’s what’s ahead:
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Moonbound update: a new note on the mini-site; title theory
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A comic book parable: I’ve never stopped thinking about this
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Links and recommendations: an interstellar croissant; the world’s best newspaper
Moonbound update
It is time to preorder my new novel Moonbound, if you haven’t already! This is an adventure that cross-fades fantasy with science fiction, comfy myth with dizzy speculation. Its narrator represents a maturation, or fruition, of the voice I’ve used in my previous novels — related, of course, to this voice right here — and it plays some POV tricks that I believe are genuinely new in fiction.
You can preorder Moonbound anywhere books are sold, and you can do it in any format, print or digital or audio. After you do, forward your confirmation email to preorder@robinsloan.com and, in May, I’ll mail you a copy of a limited-edition zine full of worldbuilding clues. Yes, in the real physical mail!
I’ll only print this zine once. Save it and sell it on eBay in 2029.
Housekeeping:
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If your mailing address is not included in the order confirmation, simply add it to the top of the forwarded email.
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Readers outside the U.S. have more limited options for preordering, but I do believe a certain leviathan retailer will, in most places, promise you a copy. If you can get Moonbound preordered, by hook or by crook, I’ll mail you a zine!
I’ve added a new note to my Moonbound mini-site; this time, it’s about the great one herself, Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve long admired one of her tricks in particular — oh, it’s a good trick — and now I’ve stolen it for myself.
Note that, regarding the balance I mentioned above — the use of language with high precision but/and zero distraction — Ursula K. Le Guin made it look easy.
Take a look and appreciate her along with me.
For a long time, I’ve cultivated a personal theory of naming. It goes like this:
When you name something, you label the thing; frame it. This is an important job, before anyone has actually encountered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. The thing’s specific characteristics and its performance — its great success, we hope — fill the vessel of its name, which was pretty empty all along. Then, instead of the name defining the thing, the thing (re)defines the name. This happens with companies, with works of art, with people themselves.
So, when naming something, while it’s important to choose an appealing label, it’s probably more important to choose a vessel of sufficient capacity.
This is why the names Star Wars and Star Trek, both of which are objectively stupid, have been so successful: their very blandness leaves them capacious.
That’s important to understand! Names can be totally stupid. Apple? YouTube? Spider-Man? SPIDER-MAN?? Those labels glow with meaning and power, and it’s not because of the words.
Any name can work, as long as it doesn’t get in the way.
In retrospect, I believe the title I chose for my second novel, Sourdough, did get in the way. I believe it hurt the book! The wound was not fatal — Sourdough continues to rise, finding new readers every day — but, even now, the label provides not an enticement or even a blank invitation but a flash of warning. (This will sound simplistic, but, honestly, it is not great for a novel’s title to promise a “sour” experience … )
I kept all of this in mind, choosing a name for this new project.
I’d collected several candidates, and I liked them all, but only as the titles of standalone novels. They didn’t stretch or scale; they had no metonymic potential, a la The Three-Body Problem (which is not actually the name of the series, except, it totally is) or Game of Thrones (ditto). That limitation sent me hunting, and my hunt brought me to Moonbound, which I think is terrific.
At the same time, I feel totally insulated: because if it’s actually stupid, that’s fine. In fact, stupid might be better, because that means it’s an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with everything that bursts out of this book, and the books to come.
Star Wars! YouTube! MOONBOUND!
The parable of Cable
I’ve read superhero comics for most of my life, but never with the intensity of my early teens. This was during the great comic book speculation bubble of the 1990s; I remember purchasing several copies of the issue depicting Superman’s death, absolutely sure that I was securing my college education.
I mean: ABSOLUTELY sure.
There’s a story from the comics of that era that never left me. In my personal cosmology, it’s become almost a parable, so I thought I’d share it with you.
Here’s my version, as neatly as I can tell it. I am going to elide many details, mostly clone-related, but they don’t change the essential shape or feeling.
To begin: two of the X-Men get married!
Beloved characters rooted in the mutant team’s first appearance, way back in 1963. A happy occasion; a storyline maturing. Soon, they have a son.
Their child is a mutant, too, and there are hints that his powers will mirror his mother’s: telepathy and telekinesis.
A twist!
The child is captured by one of the X-Men’s greatest foes, who infects him with a techno-organic virus that begins to transform his living cells. Soon, it will turn him into a sort of techno-zombie; think of the Borg, from Star Trek.
His parents launch a desperate rescue mission. Success! Their foe is defeated. Their son, however, is still infected, and no one, not even the X-Men, has a cure for the techno-organic virus.
Until!
A friendly emissary from the distant future indicates that, in her time, the child can be saved. She can take him, but it will be a one-way trip. His parents will never see him again.
They send their son to his salvation …
… which is not technological — some exotic antidote — but mental. In the future, the child is trained to apply his mutant powers to his own body, using telekinesis to hold the techno-organic virus in check.
For a less gifted mutant, this wouldn’t be an option. But this child’s powers, it turns out, are off the charts. In the future, an ally assesses his innate potential:
Telepathically, you are strong enough to sense a stray thought a continent away. Telekinetically, you could extinguish a star with something less than a conscious effort.
But he won’t do any of that, because every iota of those powers, every scrap of that gift, will be consumed by the task before him. The ally explains that living with the virus “will mean sacrificing your other abilities”—the ones we just heard about — “[and] literally fighting on a cellular level every day of your life, making sure you live to see the next dawn.”
This particular comic was published in 1994, so I was 14 — a good age, I think, to get hit with this kind of story. This kind of analogy.
The boy grows up, and although his mutant powers are fully occupied, his normal body and brain are free to develop. He becomes a soldier, crafty and formidable — a sort of futuristic Odysseus. His name is Cable.
Eventually, of course (OF COURSE), Cable travels back in time, not just once but over and over again. It’s a whole thing. When he meets his parents, they are still grieving the loss of their young son. The son, meanwhile, has gray hair, glittering cyborg prostheses.
There’s lots more to it — decades of narrative embroidery; a surfeit of clones — but this is the core: “You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.
The thing I appreciate about this story — this parable — is that it cuts a million different ways.
Isn’t poverty the techno-organic virus, and millions of people on this planet the mutant marvels, all their incandescent capability occupied by the stress of surviving day to day?
Isn’t your crappy diet the techno-organic virus, and your human body the mutant marvel, all its incredible metabolic powers bent to the task of keeping you alive, without being fed a single vegetable?
Isn’t the post-1970s politics of the U.S. the techno-organic virus, and this country’s deep creativity the mutant marvel, all our world-historic wealth and ingenuity absorbed by the struggle to keep this thing from going off the rails?
In all these versions, what’s remarkable is that, even beneath such burdens: life continues. Buoyed by fantastic powers within.
I don’t mean to be glib, comparing comic book operatics to real-world suffering. It’s just that this story has been in my head since I was a teenager, and I have so often found the analogy clarifying.
I really do believe the United States is a mutant marvel — a nation that invented a new way of being a nation; one in which equality and autonomy are not inherited or earned but rather simply: available—and I also believe that we are presently “fighting on a cellular level every day”. I think that’s been true for decades. It was true when I was reading these comic books.
Only a country of incredible capacity could have made it so far, so successfully, through bullshit so dense.
If this story was just Superman powerless beneath a red sun, it wouldn’t have the same resonance. A light switch is not interesting. The key to the parable of Cable is the ongoing process. This story is about the reservoir constantly filling, draining just as fast. It is about the balance that is sustainable, actually — and the realization that powerful forces churn beneath the surface of every sustainable balance.
The parable has been, for me, a source of empathy. I have known many Cables in my life: people profoundly gifted, those gifts consumed entirely. And it’s not that those are sad stories. Cable is a superhero! Many the people I’m thinking about did fine; are doing fine. Yet in that “fine”, there is titanic effort; constant vigilance.
“You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the superheroic task of living.
There’s another story here, significantly less resonant but still noteworthy, about how this particular comic book character started out pretty stupid, then became more and more interesting, thanks to layers of creativity and humanity added by different writers and artists over time.
Indeed: Cable’s pathos quickly became a core element of X-mythology. Even in the mid-1990s, I wasn’t reading the original comics (cited above), but rather flashbacks and retellings. That’s how superhero comics work, after all: events are sealed into the canon through layered repetition, like lacquerwork.
There’s nothing else in the creative landscape quite like it.
P.S. If anyone reading this newsletter works at a comic book publisher: yes, I will happily add a layer to one of these characters!
Links and recommendations
Here is a short piece I wrote for the Atlantic about my favorite subject 😋
I didn’t go deep on this in the Atlantic piece, because I am not a pro wrestling expert, or even that much of a fan, BUT, AND, I do love the “heel turn”: the way a wrestler (like The Rock) will become a villain, with grace and glee, for the sake of the larger story. The way everyone is in on the joke; the way everyone — the fans especially — plays their part. Kayfabe!
Pro wrestling, properly understood, is a hyper-stylized art form — a cultural treasure — right up there with commedia dell’arte and Noh.
Here is my previous approach to the same subject: my Proposal for a Book to Be Adapted Into a Movie Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
If you’d like to see a slightly different flavor of pro wrestling — one that draws comparisons not only to theater, but also to dance — watch a few minutes of this match between Will Ospreay and Marty Scurll.
For planning purposes, here is NASA’s Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses, running from 1999 B.C.E. to 3000 C.E., calculated by Fred Espenak and Jean Meeus. Even if you can’t make it to Minneapolis for the total solar eclipse in 2245, their introduction is fun and bracing. A lot of very fiddly details go into calculations covering this many centuries.
In my previous edition, I linked to an appreciation of Iain M. Banks and his Culture novels. Here is a vintage clip of Banks giving a tour of his home office.
What a dude. What a spirit.
Here is a discussion of the heliosphere, the region of space where the sun’s glow balances against incoming interstellar radiation, protecting the solar system from killer high-energy particles, making life possible. (The parable of Cable again!?)
Here’s one possible rendering, like an interstellar croissant:
Here is the 21st-century ice cream truck! I love the lightness of this approach — it runs on text messages, without any cumbersome app.
(That’s an edition of Kristen Hawley’s Expedite newsletter, which is terrific — I’m a devoted paying subscriber.)
I believe the Financial Times is the world’s best newspaper. The name is a bit of a fake out, these days; the paper ranges widely beyond finance, with an outlook that is expansive and liberal, in every sense. The FT was the first newspaper to add CLIMATE as a top-level section: a stake in the ground.
Added benefits:
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The FT is an active, comprehensive news organization, BUT, AND, it does not operate at the frenetic pace of, e.g., the modern New York Times or Washington Post. You’re welcome!
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The expense of the subscription is such that you will feel compelled to cancel any others. You’re welcome!!
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You will enjoy the hauteur of the salmon pink background.
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You will be rescued from the myopic vortex of U.S. politics.
Here are David Jonathan Ross’s notes on Indoor Kid, the latest addition to his Font of the Month Club. (I am a longstanding member.) This is a typeface for comic book lettering, and I love the extra considerations here:
In addition to my standard character set, you’ll find some extra goodies in the glyph set such as breath marks, stars, hearts, and musical notes that are sometimes found in manga.
I swapped out the typeface I use for titles on my website, and I am obsessed with the new challenger: Kyrios, from ArrowType. It hews to my preference for modern blackletter, but runs a little gooey, almost psychedelic, and … I LOVE IT
Here is a browsable database of useful numbers in biology. It’s fun to read them backward, unit to value to definition, Carnac the Magnificent-style:
Seconds … 0.1 to 0.4 … average duration of a human eye blink!
Nanometers … 2 … the average radius of a folded protein! Naturally.
Here are mini rope bridges built for mice.
In the time since I last enthused about A Good Used Book, they’ve opened a physical bookstore in Los Angeles! The space looks fabulous. LA residents, you must drop in. For non-residents (like me) it’s still great fun to follow their impeccable Instagram account: a parade of fashionable book buyers, and plenty of interesting finds offered directly. Send a DM to stake your claim; they’ll shoot back a Shopify checkout link. Couldn’t be easier.
I’ve purchased perhaps a dozen books from these folks over the past couple years. Here’s my latest acquisition, snagged via DM recently:
The U.S. edition of M. John Harrison’s anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, is coming soon from Saga Press!
This is new to me: Green’s Dictionary of Slang, “the largest historical dictionary of English slang”, an ambitious web project.
If you’re on a regular computer, check out the hover state on that alphabet strip; I’ve never seen a UI element quite like it.
This project leaps onto the shelf alongside the Online Etymological Dictionary, a.k.a. Etymonline; these are the sweetest fruits of the World Wide Web. I consult Etymonline once a week, minimum, and it provides a fabulous transect through history and culture every time.
Don Bluth's garage
A recent edition of The Animation Obsessive discusses the dynamics of Don Bluth’s departure, along with many other animators, from Disney. I remember watching Don Bluth-directed movies in the 1980s and 1990s — The Secret of NIMH! An American Tail! — but I didn’t really know anything about this backstory. The particulars are, it turns out, surprising and inspiring.
At Disney, the 1970s were a time of transition. The legendary Nine Old Men were Getting Very Old Indeed, but the reins hadn’t properly been passed:
Bluth and many of the other young trainees didn’t know how to make a movie, and they weren’t sure how to learn. According to Bluth’s colleague Gary Goldman, “We didn’t even know what questions to ask.”
Here’s Don Bluth, speaking in the 1970s:
I was watching The Sorcerer’s Apprentice part of Fantasia recently and I marveled to Ken Anderson, one of the veterans, about the water. It was so transparent. So wet. I asked Ken how they did it. … The man who created that water is long gone, Ken told me, and no one ever did get around to writing the process down. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. “We’ve never gotten it that way again.”
So, even before leaving Disney,
Bluth started a side project. An independent cartoon made with independent equipment. In his garage.
The pictures of this garage studio, reproduced in The Animation Obsessive, are fabulous — totally evocative.
[The side project] turned into “an underground animation campus.” [ … ] The learning environment proved magnetic — many Disney staffers came through to work part-time. Animator Linda Miller remembered that she “wanted to learn more about filmmaking … and it also seemed more exciting than the projects that Disney was working on.”
It keeps going:
Gradually, the production (and the rows of work desks) outgrew Bluth’s garage and took over his whole Culver City home. Guedel recalled that Bluth “literally lived with only his own single bed and a dresser in his small bedroom”—every other space “was filled with animation equipment.”
Isn’t that just a dream? It sounds like a 2000s tech startup, except with a different polarity — a different goal. The whole story is hugely energizing. I didn’t know anything about it, and I’m grateful to The Animation Obsessive for the careful documentation here.
So remember! Whatever your age, whatever your professional status, there is always this option: opening the garage, getting the gang together, learning something new.
You know, I feel like some of my neighbors at Pixar (about a mile from where I’m typing this) might benefit from an extracurricular garage project …
In what has become a familiar pattern, I was introduced to Ohara Koson’s shin-hanga (“new prints”) work through Fat Gold; we used this terrific print on a magnet back in December.
Remember: get your copy of Moonbound preordered, and forward your confirmation email to preorder@robinsloan.com.
Here’s a note from Etymonline’s creator:
Spring is harbinger season. None of the other seasons seem to have harbingers. Spring is lousy with them, wall to wall harbingers. It’s a bit unexpected.
From the lab,
Robin
P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter around the end of April.