Embedded - 235: Imagine That, Suckers! (Repeat)

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

We spoke to author Robin Sloan about his books and near-future science fiction. Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. Find Robin on twitter as @robin_____sloan. Robin’s website is robinsloan.com. Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new ‘zine (also at wizard.limo). Oh! Don’t forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and for writing. Some books Robin suggested: Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynshi Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie Hild by Nicola Griffith

Hello, and welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. Have you ever read a novel and thought, that author really understands my world? Have you ever wanted to have said author on your podcast to geek out about near-future science fiction, robot arms, and artificial intelligence? The answer is yes to all that. Get your own darn podcast. This one is mine, and our guest is Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. Hi, Robin. We're thrilled to talk to you today.

Well, thanks for inviting me on. It's a real pleasure to be here. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Sure. Well, I'm a writer. That's how I pay my rent these days. I write fiction, a little bit of short fiction, but mostly novels. But I have both a professional background and I guess an enthusiastic interest in technology. I've worked at a couple different technology companies in the past, and I've been a great enthusiast grade tinkerer with all kinds of technology my whole life. I think that shows it influences your books. So we won't be talking more about technology. But first, we have lightning round.

Okay. Where we ask you short questions. We want short answers. And if we are behaving ourselves, this will go very fast. Okay, very good. I'm ready. Okay. Favorite childhood author?

Roald Dahl. Fictional technology that you think will be real in our lifetimes? Fictional technology that I think will be real. I think we're going to have voice assistants as good and natural as anything we've ever seen in a movie. Jarvis from Iron Man. Oh, yes. Should we bring back the dinosaurs? Um, no, but I think we should bring back the woolly mammoth. Nothing can go wrong with that. California or Michigan? California. I'm happy to have been from Michigan, and I still go back all the time, but California is my home now, and I think it's one of the greatest places on earth.

Book that you wish you'd written? his sort of contemporary big end trilogy set in kind of a dark shadowy version of our own world. I think they're just awesome. And my favorite kind of science fiction, or almost science fiction. Complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, boy, that's a hard question. The answer has to be complete one project so you can move on to the next, always. Cool. All right. So, Mr. Penumbra, this is a book, and every time I try to summarize it, I get lost, whether it is in Dragonlance Chronicle callbacks or Google Politics or Startup Culture or Ruby on Rails coding, and I just, I can't describe it. I assume you can? Well, I usually start simple. Because of course, the way the story opens, well before it gets into

all those, you know, sort of strange pathways and tendrils into different parts of culture, the way the story opens is pretty simple. It's the tale of a young man who loses his sort of tenuous design job in the Great Recession of 2008 and the years shortly after. And kind of desperate for a new gig, he ends up working the late shift, like the really late shift at a 24-hour bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. So of course, as you can imagine, this bookstore is stranger than it appears at first. And it appears pretty strange at first, so that's saying a lot. And this new night clerk kind of finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into this mystery that ends up involving very old books and also pretty new technology. And cryptography. And cryptography, codes, puzzles, and the people who like codes and puzzles. I'm glad it wasn't, I'm glad you couldn't summarize it in like three sentences, because

it really, it had so many, it was like an octopus. It had so many different tendrils, but it was all together. Yeah, that's good to hear, because I feel like those are the kind of books that I like to read, too. And, you know, I think you're always trying, to some degree, to produce the kind of book you would like to read when you're writing one. And I also think that's what novels can do really well. I think one of the great strengths of the novel is it can reach out its tentacles into all those worlds and kind of, you know, for the people who know those worlds, it's very satisfying to read about them. And of course, for the people who

don't, it's exciting. It's a picture of things that you never knew existed. It was unpredictable to me, too. That was one of the things I liked about it was, as I was reading, you know, the first third, I said, where is he going with this? What is going to happen? I don't, and then, you know, toward the end, it all makes sense and comes together and all those pieces fit. But I like being taken on a journey where I'm not quite sure where I'm going. And yet it was familiar because we know about Google. So how did you know about Google politics? Oh, good question. So of course, you know, anyone who spends any time working at a tech company or just connected to computers or technology in the Bay Area for long enough, I think, ends up getting pulled into Google's orbit somehow.

And in my case, I've never worked there. I've never been a professional Googler. But I did have a roommate who was a Googler for several years, who was also a world-class bridge player. It's just, I feel like every Googler is also like, by the way, casually, I am one of the, you know, 10 best people in the world at Go or like playing Go and karate at the same time. So I had the roommate who was a Googler and who's always telling me interesting stories. And of course, I've been down to the Googleplex several times, particularly when I worked at a company called Current TV, which is a sort of now defunct, but sort of ambitious little cable TV startup in San Francisco. We were doing a bunch of projects

with Google. And so I'd go down there and just get to see the place and, you know, hear how people talked and what they griped about. And that sort of formed the core of my fictional exaggeration of the real place. In both, and I'm going to skip ahead just a little bit, but we'll not stay there. But in both Mr. Penumbra and Sourdough, your portrayal of startups, and I was going to ask this question later,

but now seems like the right time. Your portrayal of startups is very accurate, but also kind of love-hate. I can't quite draw a beat on exactly what you're feeling about startups. I'm glad to hear that, actually. You know, there's other works of fiction, plenty of them, that take the pretty purely, like, dark satire path. They're like, oh man, this is dystopian stuff. And these are dystopian environments. So let's, you know, let's have some fun kind of painting that dark, creepy picture. And of course, there are parts about these companies, both the products they

make and the way that the work kind of unfolds that is creepy or unhealthy. But, you know, as someone who worked at a place like Twitter for a couple years, it was really fun, too. I found it inspiring to be surrounded by really, really smart, engaged people who are all sort of being called upon to do really, really high-end work. I mean, just really the brains, the brains at a place like that, especially if you're someone who is always trying to kind of transmute everyday conversations into something that's going to go on the page. Boy, I tell you, I was taking a lot of affection for those organizations and the things they do and the people who work there. But of course, I think to paint them as any kind of utopian dreamscape of, you know, progress is just naive. You have to, you have to have a sense of kind of self-awareness and irony about some of the things that are not perfect about Google, Facebook,

Twitter, and all the rest. And all the startups. The extreme work hours, the focus on work, and then the realization that maybe having a life is worth it. Yeah, that's right. And I have to say there was a change, actually, in my own, certainly my own awareness, and then also my own rendering of that work between Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which was published in 2012, and then also my own rendering of that work between Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which was published in 2012, and Sourdough, which was just published last fall in the tail end of 2017. And I think that is a large part of it, that sense of like, hold on, what are we doing here? I felt it was both artistically important and also kind of politically necessary to maybe dial that part of the picture up or paint that part of the portrait with kind of brighter shades.

So yeah, the characters in Sourdough are much more aware of kind of the burn of it and the intensity and maybe even the burnout of those kind of roles. I feel like we've been talking about it because we've all read it. Well, I assume you've read it, you wrote it, but that doesn't... Anyway, maybe we should summarize Sourdough, if you would be so kind. Sure. Yeah, yeah, sure. So Sourdough, like Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour book story, it's the tale of a young person in the Bay Area, but it's somewhat on a pretty different trajectory. The protagonist and narrator of Sourdough is a young software engineer, originally from Michigan, just like me, who comes out to the Bay Area following a job. She gets hired at a robot factory that's kind of the world's leading producer of these very, very capable robot arms being used in laboratories and

factories and all sorts of things. So she's a programmer there. It's very exciting. It's an intense place. As it turns out, it's a little bit too intense. And she feels herself kind of spiraling down into an abyss. She just doesn't know how to keep up. And she doesn't know how to feed herself along the way.

So as all this is happening, and she's kind of discovering this intense new world of San Francisco and robot making, she, through really strange circumstances, gets her hands on a sourdough starter. And this, of course, is the kind of microbial goop that is really important to baking sourdough bread, to make it all light and fluffy and airy and to give it its kind of tangy flavor. And long story short, she decides she's going to learn how to bake. And it is learning to bake with this very strange starter that sets her on a totally different journey into the world of San Francisco Bay Area food. And of course, there are lots of mysteries and adventures waiting for her there. And San Francisco Bay Area food is not straightforward. You portray that as highly politicized and often run by people who have opinions just because they can.

How did you learn about that? Well, that, you know, it is interesting how these things kind of come into your brain and stew there for a while. And yeah, just how you learn about these worlds enough to at least somewhat credibly portray them. Sometimes it's reading, you know, nonfiction and journalism. Sometimes it's direct experience. Sometimes it's a person, like truly a friend or a partner, in my case. Catherine Tomajan is my partner of many years. She has been in the world of Bay Area food for all those years. And she was really my guide, you know, kind of luring me in and teaching me about what to eat, how to eat, who does what, and how it all works. So, the book is dedicated to her. And that's because without Catherine's influence, I would never have even known where to begin writing a book set in the world of food. I, of course, loved The Robot Arm.

I have my own tiny robot arm, and I'm trying to teach it to type. And reading the book, it was like you were in my head. How did that happen? That is a great question. Well, I've been, like any thinking person, I have been obsessed with robot arms for a long time. You know, how could you fail to be obsessed with these wonderful kind of pivoting, you know, agile little creatures? And I also, I considered getting one once too. I have literally no use for a robot arm, but there was some kind of cheap Kickstarter-y robot arm product. And I was

like, maybe I could find a use for that robot arm. I ended up not joining that Kickstarter, which I think was a good choice. But I just think they're fascinating. And the degree to which they're sort of taking over these tasks one by one, you know, it begins with the really kind of rigid stuff in, say, a car assembly line where these, you know, huge, huge armatures that are able to like lift a whole car chassis or kind of plug a whole windshield into its hole on the front of the car are doing their thing. And it's impressive. But at the same time, the whole process is like very, very rigid. They know exactly what to expect. Everything is in its place perfectly. And in fact, if something is out of place, then like everything grinds to a halt. The arms don't know how to kind of recalibrate to that. Now, it seems to me, based on what I've seen and kind of the products that I've seen emerge, things are changing. And suddenly these arms are just a lot more kind of flexible. And especially with all the sensors and kind of cameras attached to them, they can sort of puzzle their way through situations in a way that is maybe like a little spookily human and also really powerful. Like these arms are going to take over a lot of jobs that are done by people now. So you add the beauty of the machine to the sort of economic and political impact of their work. And like, how could you not want to write about that?

I completely agree. Completely. But were you worried with either book? Were you worried that it was too niche? How do you say that word? Let's start with that. Because there is a lot of engineering and a lot of technology. Yeah, that's a good question. And the answer is yes, I always worry about that. I worry about leaving people behind. It's a balancing act because at the same time, I actually think the greater danger is chickening out and glossing over things, kind of smoothing over the technical edges in the way that, frankly, most media, most storytelling that involves technology does. Because I think when you do that, frankly, the people who don't understand the tools and the technology, they don't really care. They're just like, okay, whatever. I'm here for the story. I'm here for the other stuff. Proceed. But then when you smooth things over,

the people who do know the real way it works, you know, it just, you lose that sense of resimilitude and that respect, honestly, for the industries, for the crafts, for the people who do the work. And also just for the language, you know, for the terminology and all the wonderful texture of like the real deal. So in a way, what I'm always more afraid of doing is losing the people who really know this stuff. And the truth is, you can take anything, no matter how deeply technical it is. And if you embed it in a story, and you put it in the mouth of a compelling character, you know, maybe a character who's like explaining it step by step to another character, you can get away with anything. That's the work of a writer. And

nobody should ever say that they're afraid to put something really technical into a book. That makes a lot of sense. I know so much about English horse racing from Dick Francis Mysteries. And it's not information I would ever use, but it seems accurate. Well, both stories have, and I'm not sure there's a real spoiler to say this, have fantastical or kind of magical realism sort of things occurring in them. So, having an anchor of something that is familiar and definitely real and analytical was kind of cool because it was, okay, these fantastic things are happening, but also there's this real stuff. So, there's a nice balance of anchoring things to something familiar. One of my favorite things that people say about either book is, I couldn't tell where the real world stopped and the fictional world began.

Yeah. You know, things kind of in that gray area of like, wait, did he make that up? Or is that a real thing? And you know, it sends them hustling over to Google to check something out. And I just think to be writing a novel in the 21st century, that is just one of the best things you can hear that, you know, every couple chapters, people had to just set the book down for a second to run a query and, you know, see if they were dealing with your imagination or the weirdness of the world. Love it. To go out and buy a robot arm. Yeah, that too.

That too. Maybe I should have some sort of commission program where, you know, people can use a coupon code from Sourdough and they get 5% off a cool industrial robot arm and I get a cut. Are you ever surprised what people get out of the book? Oh, always. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I've learned, um, and this might sound a little basic, but, but truly it, it surprised me. People get very different things out of books. And people also read books for different reasons. For me as a reader, particularly a reader of science fiction, I feel like, you know, I'm always interested in just good writing, good prose, in something kind of interesting and engaging and a little bit suspenseful. But primarily what I want is cool ideas. You know,

I want to kind of download stuff into my head that wasn't there before that kind of gives me that tingle, that little electrical spark of like, oh, wow, what if we did install a giant space mirror above Alaska, you know, or whatever. So like that. That's not the case for everyone. Other people really read books for relationships. Some people read books just to pass the time. Some people do read books, even novels, to learn about the world. They really love that feeling of like, oh, I understand English horse racing now. Or, you know, I understand what it's like to work at Google now. And on and on and on. I mean, everything you hear, it's just sometimes people will tell me something they really liked about a book, or frankly, something they didn't like about one of my books, one of the ways in which they thought it fell short. And I'll just kind of have to smile and go,

you are a very different reader from me. And I think that's wonderful. You know, I think it's great that there's that variety. Okay, I have to ask, what don't people like about it? Oh, all sorts of things. One thing that I do notice that always surprises me, particularly with the first one, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore, it's the people who really do read for relationships, people who care very much about the romances of the characters. And they get mad that my two kind of main characters, Clay, who's the narrator, and Kat, who's the brilliant Googler, they actually don't end up together in the end of the book. That's a mild spoiler, but I think it's okay. And man, some people are mad at me about that. They wanted a happy ending to that romance or a different ending to that

romance. And it just always surprises me that I'm like, but there was a puzzle and the solution to the puzzle was so cool. They're like, I don't care. They need to be together. Yeah, the drive towards happily ever after is pretty strong among readers, at least for me. I see that a lot. Do people say that it's too much technology? Yeah, of course. I mean, at this point, you know, the good news is a book gets enough readers and anything that can be said about it will be said about it by someone at some point. And yeah, for sure. Particularly Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore, there are plenty of readers who, you know,

they went in, I think, expecting a very sort of warm, comforting tale of old bookshops and, you know, the pleasure of books. Of course, those things are there in the story, but so is Google and so is technology. And by the end, they say things like, well, I didn't expect to read a 300-page commercial for Google. And again, I always have to smile and go, I'm not, I think you read it differently than I did, which is totally valid. You know, and again, I always have to smile and go, I'm not, I think you read it differently than I did, which is totally valid. You know, I really, I respect the sort of sovereignty of the reader's take on a book. And if they get something out of it that I didn't expect or didn't intend, I mean, it's there. It's there to be extracted. But yeah, there's definitely folks who I think would have preferred a novel that had no code whatsoever, no data visualization, no giant compute clusters, and just was all old books and, you know, curling yellow pages.

Okay, why do't that far off? I mean, some cliches are cliches because they're a little bit true. It goes like this. A first novel is basically a writer kind of unscrewing the top of their head and pouring out the entire contents of their brain into a book because they've had so long to stew. I mean, it's all been building up from the moment they ever imagined writing a book at like age seven or whatever it was. It's all the years since it's been building up. And also there's this kind of urgency, this question, like, will I even get to write another one? And the answer to that, of course, could be no. So, this pent up fuel, this sort of sense of urgency, like I got to take my shot. First novels, I think it's true, They tend to have this density and this almost kind of like manic, like, also, I'm really into falconry. Oh, there's a character who trains falcons, you know,

and all this weird stuff. And so, I think that's the honest answer. Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore was kind of a map of everything I was and am interested in. And I just poured it all in and lit the flame. I was terrified of sourdough. Having purchased Artemis but not read it, having purchased Armada but not read it and decided I never would. And then I got sourdough and I was just like, I'm not sure. It actually sat after we met you at a bookshop and it sat,

signed for a little while until a close friend said, no, no, it was awesome. I read it one day. It was awesome. And then it sat a little while longer in pure anticipation of knowing I had a good book waiting for me and I could wait until I was sick or sad or something that would make it so that a good book would be there. How many people came up to you and said, well, I don't, your second book, I don't think you should have. I mean, did you just have nightmares about that? Did it happen? Was it not that bad? Because people said, oh, yeah, this is awesome. Ah, yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't. Truly, it was not that bad. Of course, again, these cliches that

turn out to have kind of kernels of truth in them, the cliche of the sophomore effort, whether it's a second album from some, you know, great sort of cool, innovative band, or a second novel from a writer you like, it's always very fraught. Because, of course, you want to do all the things that people liked, but not so much or so with such kind of mimicry that it just seems like another scoop of the same pudding, right? You want it to be a little bit different too and kind of move forward in some way. And that's hard to do. It's just, it's not easy. So of course, I was worried about it. But the truth is, I had a pretty clear vision for this book and how I wanted it to feel from the beginning, from kind of the initiation of

the project. I just, I had this sense of a vibe and a world I wanted it to be set in, some things I wanted to talk about. And it took me a while to get there. There were some false starts, and there's a lot of stuff I threw away, which is actually not the experience of writing the first novel. That one was kind of straight through and just kind of step by step, things fell into place. So the writing of it was harder. But then by the time I was finished with it, I was really happy with what I had produced. You know, I would kind of sit and read it in the editing process as we went through the various drafts. I would just sit and I would read a few chapters and they would make me smile. You know, I'd be like, you know what, if I pick this book up off the shelf,

I would really like it. I would think this was a cool book that was, you know, said things about the world that I thought were interesting and kind of was written in a cool, appealing way. So, I think when you have that feeling, it's a pretty good buffer against the angst and the worry. And then, yeah, as it came out into the world, people said a sufficient quantity of nice things that I felt good about the whole process. I know we asked you if you'd like to start, finish one project or start a dozen. But how soon after finishing the first book did you start working on the second? Or did they overlap at all? Oh, yeah, they definitely overlap. It was very soon. I'd actually started like the earliest, earliest kind of scribblings even before Mr. Pernumber's 24-hour bookstore was out on bookstore

shelves. It was kind of in the can, you know, going through the production process of the publisher. This was the summer of 2012. And, you know, I knew I wanted to try to make this my job. I wanted to see if I could kind of keep this going. So I sat down and I started thinking about what stories could be next. And I had just, I had some funny experiences kind of in the, again, through Catherine in the world of food, just these sort of little moments and anecdotes and things that people would say that they seem to sort of turn my presumptions about the world on its head or kind of maybe twist them off axis by a few degrees. Because of course, they were talking about like very fancy food and, you know, things that were delicious and expensive and, you know, very kind of high-end.

But then there would be something about the story that involved like smuggling things across borders or someone like hiding a clipping of a wine grape in their suitcase to like bring it back to California and, you know, plant it in their own vineyard. These little bits of almost like spy stories that were braided through this kind of more, sort of the stories that I expected about food. And I just loved that feeling. And so that summer, I was like, I think maybe this is the novel I want to write. And so I started it then. Did you use it as an excuse to try all the foods and visit all the wineries and all the olive trees?

Yes, definitely. Definitely 100%. One of the great, great benefits of being a fiction writer is that you can justify literally any activity as research. So how much time did you spend in the Ferry Building? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's truly a warning. Warning to all aspiring fiction writers out there. It can be dangerous, because it's not just, you know, the kind of this fun kind of boondoggle stuff like, well, you know, I don't think I took notes well enough the first time. We'll have to go back up to Sonoma County or whatever. That like, you know, I think maybe I should really learn about like ham radio. Wait, like why? Well, you know, maybe I'll write a novel about ham radio, or robot arms, or artificial intelligence, or sewing, or soldering, or basket weaving, you know, whatever. You can really talk yourself into almost anything. Because as it turns out,

everything is interesting. And all you need to write a novel is interesting stuff. You write a book about ham radio. I'm sure some of our listeners will appreciate that greatly. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure. So there's a process to writing a book. From the outside, I think the process looks something like step one, write book. Step two, get it published. Step three, dive in piles of cash like Scrooge McDuck. Could you break that down a little further?

Yeah, right. I like that. I like that image. That sounds very appealing. Yeah, let's discuss step one. It really is, you know, it's different for different kinds of writing and different kinds of creative production. To write something like a short story. Well, here, let me back up. I started with short stories. And I would write them sometimes in a day or in a couple days. And, you know, it was very much about sitting down and kind of capturing some feeling that had sort of possessed you. I still remember, I would take bike rides, like around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and I would just have odd ideas, and they would start piling up,

and suddenly I'd get excited. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I could fit those things together. That would be a cool story. And I'd turn my bike around, and I'd race back to my apartment, and I would zoom in and sit down on my laptop and just start typing. And then by the afternoon of the next day, I would have a draft of some little scrap of a short story. That's kind of the feeling.

And I feel like that's the feeling of writing that is often depicted like in movies or in whatever sort of televisual depictions of the craft. It's sort of the, you know, the inspired writer kind of bent over the typewriter going tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap-a. And it's all coming out and it's all exciting. The difference I learned between writing something like that, a short story and a novel, really is endurance, sort of systems, and really just like a dedication to sitting in the same chair, maybe not every day, but a lot of days, and doing the work and putting in the time. It's not like writing. Writing a novel is not like

writing 30 short stories. It's like writing one novel. And it takes a lot of time. And that time is spent alone, which I think a lot of people, on some level, they sort of know that, but then confronted with sitting alone at their kitchen table all weekend, many weekends in a row, are kind of like, no, this was not my vision for my life. And they decide to do something else. But if you can do it, if you can keep your butt in the chair alone and kind of confront the words on the screen, you know, enough time passes and you have something that maybe you could pull into shape and turn into a novel.

Sounds just like software engineering. You know, I actually, I think there's, I think there's real truth to that. I think software engineering, of course, it depends on the project, depends what you're doing. I think it's actually more structured and has the benefit perhaps of like beginning with kind of a defined vision of the end state. You're like, oh, I want to write a program to do this thing for me, or I want to write a web application that's going to kind of provide these features or these tools. And of course, the problem with novel writing is that you're defining the goal at the same time and redefining the goal

constantly as you're producing it. Maybe what I'm saying is that there's just a lot of spaghetti code in novels. I've definitely worked at places where the software process is exactly like a novel process. What are we doing? I don't know. Let's write some. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, going into that, do you start out with an outline? I mean, I guess it's sort of a software spec. Right, right, right. You know, and this is where the experience and the kind of practices of writers vary so, so widely. I am sort of in the middle. There's people who they outline and their outline is almost like a mini novel. You could read the outline and it would be real kind of

clunky and not very much fun, but you would get something out of it. You would get a story out of it. You know, conversely, there's other writers who do this thing of just going almost sentence by sentence, and they'll say that they get to the next page and it completely surprises them. They're like, whoa, I did not see that coming. Okay, well, let's see where it goes. It's a very kind of organic, improvisational process. And I'm, I mean, most people, of course, are somewhere in between those extremes. And I am one of them. I make notes about the overall structure. And I kind of know the things that I want to appear along the way, the things that I'm interested in, whether that's a character or a certain setting or technology or just an idea. And I have just notes and notes

and notes, megabytes of text, just that I've collected over the years, little scraps that I know I want to find a place for at some point. But then the process of getting from point to point and kind of unfolding the story, for me, it actually is a little more organic. I have never been quite organized or disciplined enough to do the like, you know, heading A, subheading G, point three, Clay will walk into the bookstore sort of outline. That makes writing nearly mechanical. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny. Again, there's so many different kinds of readers. There's also so many different kinds of writers. And I love it. I love that sort of just almost Cambrian explosion diversity. And you look at a very successful writer, someone like James Patterson. I mean, this is like one of the most widely read writers probably in history. Not

known for literary grace or necessarily for saying like deep, profound things about the world, but you know, writes stories that people enjoy and writes them very consistently, churns them out. And it turns out that the way that James Patterson writes is actually quite mechanical. It's almost like a fiction factory. He has a crew of writers that he's hired. Some of them get credit on the books, others don't. And many of them work from an outline that he prepares. He will come up with his sort of notes toward the whatever 17th volume in whatever suspense series he's working on, and then hand it off. And that person will sort of inflate that speck into a mass of words, presumably hand that back to James Patterson at some point where he'll like make a few red marks and send it back. And eventually, you know, it shows up on the

shelves in Target and Walmart and everywhere else and sells like 5 million copies. And, you know, of course, there's some things about that process that are pretty cynical and grim. But I also admire the creativity to sort of say, you know what, there's probably a lot of different ways to make a book that people want to read. And let's try one that does not conform to the image of like, the inspired writer at, you know, her desk in the morning with her cup of coffee. I think that's okay to experiment and play a little bit like that. So I kind of want to ask you what your next book is about, but I don't think you'll tell me. So what new technologies are you exploring right now? And for the observant listener, there is good reason to believe that this actually will provide some evidence of the subject of my next fiction project. and these sort of machine learning tools that can take a corpus of data, whether it's images or sound or words, you know, text, and do something, transform it in some way, learn to mimic it

really well, learn to kind of tell the difference between different kinds. In particular, I would say my focus has been on machine learning as it gets applied to text, because of course, text is kind of my business. And I'm interested in machine learning models that help you generate text. Turns out, there's just all sorts of interesting things you can do if you can gather together megabytes and megabytes of something, you know, maybe it's all the old Sherlock Holmes stories, maybe it's a corpus of golden age science fiction stories, maybe it's contemporary fiction, maybe it's, you know, newspaper articles. You can pick. You can feed that into one of these models and then ask it to generate different kinds of things, you know, a paragraph of text, a sentence. You could ask it to take one of your sentences and kind of transform it to seem more like that style that it's learned

so well. And I just think that is fascinating. It's that learning the tools and some of the math and techniques behind them has been just interesting for me. I kind of have felt like little folds forming in my brain as I try to make sense of this stuff. And I think the creative potential is actually profound. So I want to be one of the first writers to actually use these tools to produce fiction that somehow like kind of involve artificial intelligence or machine learning as a tool alongside the keyboard and the notepad. So you're replacing yourself? No, you know, I will say, I actually will take, I will take, I take pains to say no,

definitely not. Because even if, it's so interesting, there's definitely plenty of people out there who are, you know, kind of researchers or creative, you know, mavericks who are trying to kind of design systems that could write a story on their own, you know, you kind of feed in a few parameters, or not just maybe just say go for it. And it could produce this like sort of coherent short story. And it would be maybe interesting to read. And technically, it's an interesting challenge, but creatively, as with a writer and a reader, I just think it's such a dead end because there's no shortage of stories to read. I mean, it'd be one thing if the world was facing some great fiction drought, and it was like,

oh, there's just not enough fiction. We need something. We need some machine to make this process more efficient so we could finally have enough fiction to read. Of course, that's not the case. We're like drowning in it. And people who like to read are always lamenting, like they don't have enough time to read all the things that they want to read. So while you could replace a human fiction writer, I don't think there's a really good reason to, certainly not a good economic reason, and also not even a good aesthetic reason. What's more interesting, therefore, is finding ways to sort of augment the capabilities of human writers so that they can write stories that are stranger or, I don't know, just different than what they would have written otherwise. All right. I have a lot more questions, but I think I need to wait until your next book comes out. That's fair. I pledge to return and we can talk all about it. It's, yeah, artificial intelligence is the core of it. It's another California story. And yeah, and hopefully it'll have some interesting things to say about creativity and machine minds and, you know, also have some mysteries and suspense and adventure and all that stuff too.

But this isn't your first foray into artificial intelligence. No, I've been preoccupied been kind of my main technical enthusiast hobby for about two years, which corresponds roughly to the emergence of the first sort of open source tools that made it possible for a low to medium level programmer like me to actually play with this stuff, which is like not an AI researcher who kind of could code all of the gnarly math by hand, which I definitely can't. And so that stuff first started to appear about two years ago. And like a lot of people, I kind of glommed onto it like, oh, what's this? And boy, I have to say, you know, a lot of the work tends to deal with images, and it's all very kind of interesting and spooky. But that by itself

was not enough to really grab my attention. If it had just been the image stuff, I think I would have been like, oh, wow, cool, interesting stuff, and sort of moved on. It was these machine learning models for text that I would like download the code and kind of get it running on my computer and train it on some corpus of text. In my case, it was a bunch of science fiction stories. I was really, I'd collected all these scans of old science fiction magazines from like the 50s and 60s. And so I had this big bundle of stuff. So I trained this model on this corpus. And I was like, okay, model, what you got? What have you learned? And the text it generated was so weird. I mean, it was like a perfect,

it was a perfect sort of imitation of the style. Like it would talk about stars and spaceships and, you know, like, jetpacks and the sort of slightly overwrought, you know, kind of purplish prose, like, weird adjectives and adverbs and things like that. It sounded just right. But then, of course, it would, like, spiral off in strange directions because it didn't really know what was going on in these stories. And it would use word combinations that I would never have imagined, but they ended up being really beautiful and appealing. And as soon as I saw that, and again, this is like two years ago, I was like, oh man, that's something right there. That's like a thing that could be useful and interesting and rewarding. So that kind of set me on my journey to try to integrate these tools into my own work.

What tools are you using and how did you learn them? Well, let's see. Right now the focus is to take these machine learning models and the different things they can output and actually bring it into the text editor. Because right now, of course, most of it happens on the command line, which is fine for people running research

and they want to just kind of generate output and compare it to some benchmark to see if they've achieved some new state of the art or whatever. Maybe it's like running on a web server and doing something for consumers. For me, I want to actually use this text. I want to use it in a creative way. So that means it has to be in the text editor. So most of my work has been kind of wiring up these models, these systems, these neural networks that other people have, for the most part, kind of designed and really kind of polished. But I'm wiring those up so that I can kind of summon

that help, that input right there in the text editor as I'm working on writing of my own. And yeah, I mean, I use a whole variety of different things. Some of it is based on Google's TensorFlow neural network software, which is awesome. I mean, basically, it all runs in the programming language called Python, which I was new to. But like a lot of these languages, it's easy enough to kind of learn the four things about its syntax that you really need to know to kind of hack something together. But there's a bunch, you know, it's good news that in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, there's a real ethic of sharing your work

and kind of producing usable open source code. So there's no shortage of things you can kind of clone off of GitHub and get running on your own computers pretty fast. And you made a neural net for audio for Sourdough. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that was sort of a, that was an unanticipated product of this learning,

this weird kind of preoccupation. In Sourdough, a big part of the story has to do with a very strange music. And of course, in the book, that's the wonderful thing about fiction. You can just say like, you know, oh, it's like a very mysterious music that sounded like nothing she had ever heard before. The syllables danced on the edge of understanding, but didn't seem like any language she knew. Dot, dot, dot. And you're like, cool. Okay. Imagine that, suckers. But as it turns out, audiobooks are very, very popular. It's actually an important

part of any book's kind of life in the world these days. A lot, a lot of people listen to novels on audiobook. And contemplating the release of Sarada's audiobook, I knew it'd be kind of disappointment to just have that description there read by the narrator and not offer anything, not even like the faintest sort of ghostly suggestion of like what that music actually sounds like. So using a process very similar to what I described for text, except for audio, I took some of the music, the real music that had inspired those descriptions, fed it into a neural network, had it kind of learn the patterns, the shapes of those sounds, and then generate some new sound of its own, which, as with the text, sounded like sort of

recognizable, but also very weird and kind of inhuman and alien. And it turned out to just have a sound that was really appealing and actually appropriate for the way I had described the music. So I took a bunch of the output and I zipped it up and sent it off to an unsuspecting audiobook producer who then found ways to kind of thread it through the audiobook. It was cool. It was really, really a satisfying way to actually use those tools and produce something creatively very interesting.

What I find fascinating is that the neural net stuff and the machine learning stuff, you hear about it in the press. It's all about self-driving cars or replacing your jobs. But there have been a whole bunch of creative people, artists and authors and musicians, who have been applying it to art. And that was kind of unexpected to me when, you know, when you first started hearing about it becoming a real thing again, after many, many years of this is coming soon. But I've seen, you know, I've seen compositions

created by neural nets. And you've seen the thing where you can take any image and apply an artist's style to it by running it through some training set. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's surprising to me. I think that observation is spot on. I think it is actually a little bit surprising and very exciting. And I think it's just, you know, thank goodness for open source culture. Thank goodness that even at these titanic mega corporations, there is a sort of expectation bordering on obligation that, you know, you're going to work on this stuff, you're going to develop new tools, and then you're going to share them with everyone with documentation, you know, with instructions for how to actually get this stuff up and running for free, just so we can see what happens. And truly, all the artists, you know, so many of these creative coders are really, really talented programmers in their own right. But I would just say, based on my own experience and my own conversations, they're not at the level where

they could, like, implement the instructions in one of these academic papers from scratch. Of course, people at Google could do that, and they do do that all the time. They're like, oh, it's very interesting, this new work that just came out of, you know, Montreal. And they sit down and they're reading the equations and sort of just nimbly transforming that into Python code. That's a whole other level. And there's this whole mass of people who, they can snap things together, you know, they can make computers do what they want, especially if it comes to graphics and sound and things like that. And so to suddenly just have those pieces, those really deep, mathy, like very, very optimized pieces available to them, thanks to Google and Facebook and, you know, different academic institutions and others, it just opens up this whole world of really, really interesting possibilities. I think it's hugely exciting. And new things are emerging literally every week.

It's really just a fun world to be following right now. My background is engineering and computers, and I have been learning about machine learning, and it's not easy. Do you find it intimidating? How do you get over that? You know, I think this is where kind of coming at things as a, I don't know, permanent beginner or sort of this sort of proudly enthusiast level practitioner really helps. Because, you know, certainly if you're

working at Google, or just in kind of a social network of programmers, I think my perception, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but my perception is that there's a bit of pressure to kind of always kind of reassure people that yes, you too are a very talented coder. And of course, you understand this, you are one with the computer. Whereas for me, I just have always been comfortable with the fact that I really don't understand most of this stuff. It's really, I mean, so easy. I feel like I'm always waiting in the ocean. And I'll take a step and be like, oh, that's too deep. Back, back, back, back, back, just like, make sure the water is only up to my knees. And with that sort of admission of a ceiling to your skill comes a kind of freedom to sort of play, to muddle through, to snap things together. I was talking with a class at Stanford.

It was actually a science fiction class. And a lot of the people in the class, I'd been invited by the professor to come in and talk about writing and actually talk about some of this neural network stuff as well. And many of the students in the class are computer science majors. You know, they want to become engineers at Google or places like that. And I was talking to one of them about the choice of tools. I was like, well, you know, I thought I was giving him sage advice. I was like, yeah, you know, I find TensorFlow, Google's thing, to be really useful. And it's really, really well documented, which is the main thing.

And he looked at me so flatly. He was like, oh, no, I think I'm probably going to implement all my tools from scratch. I really think I need to understand how they work at the most basic level. I was like, ah, yes, we are different. Well, it's also a trap that a lot of us engineer types get into. I don't really understand this, but I want to use it. But I'm not going to let myself use it until I understand it from first principles. And then you get lost and never complete anything. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So much yes.

It's nice to allow yourself the freedom to not have to understand it from first principles. Okay, so moving on, because I have a few more questions that I definitely want to ask. What is your favorite nonfiction book? Oh boy, my favorite nonfiction book. It's a hard question, but I always think when questions like that are posed, the most honest thing is to say just like the first thing that pops into your head. And something did pop into my head. So I'll tell you what it is. With a caveat that this is probably not the accurate answer. If I sat for three days, I would come up with like the real true nonfiction book of my soul. But the book that popped into my head is a book called Home by a writer named Witold Rybczynski, who is a longtime writer about architecture, kind of how buildings come together and the aesthetics of buildings. Home is sort of a social history of the idea of home, short little book. I mean, it can't be more than 250 pages. And kind of step by step,

he talks about the emergence in all sorts of different places, you know, England, Northern Europe, different parts of Europe, different parts of the world, the emergence of kind of the building blocks of what we, at least in the US today, think of as like a very normal home. And it's everything from like the bedroom to the kitchen to the way windows work to the very idea that a home should be at least a little bit private or a little bit comfortable. He's like, you know, chapter three, the invention of comfort. And you're like, wait, the invention of that wasn't, huh? And he's like, no, that wasn't a thing until the 1600s in

Amsterdam or, you know, whatever. And it's exemplary of the kind of nonfiction books I really like, which are the ones that take something that seems so normal as to be like, just a natural law, like almost like, of course, that's the way the world is. How could the world be a different way? And kind of step by step, the writer shows you how it's in fact, the weirdest thing ever and totally contingent and, you know, a product of strange and unpredictable historical forces. So, home. Cool. I have been reading a lot about octopus and squid, all the stuff, the pots. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And it's a lot, it's the non-human sentience or intelligence that is just amazing to me. Did you read any of those types of books when you wrote Sourdough? Because maybe I shouldn't spoil that. Yeah. There's some form of non-human sentience in Sourdough. Definitely. No, that's a good tease. That's a good tease.

Come for the robot arms, stay for the non-human sentience. Yeah. I did. I definitely did read books like that. My reading was more about, of course, microbes and microbial communities. It's a cool time to be learning about that stuff because our understanding of microbes, like the way they work in the human body, the way they work in nature, has really grown by leaps and bounds in just the last decade. And again, just like artificial

intelligence, there's like really wild new things emerging, it seems like every week. And again, just like artificial intelligence, there's like really wild new things emerging, it seems like, every week. And yeah, I really loved reading about the sort of emergence of really sophisticated behaviors from these little building blocks. I mean, like, we know what microbes are. It's not like they're hiding a secret brain in the ninth dimension. I mean, well, maybe they are, but probably not. Probably not. They probably are just the little, you know, very simple cellular organisms that they appear to be. But it turns out some of the tools they have, like the chemical signaling, using electricity and light and all sorts of things like that, and then all together in these enormous communities, really, really amazing behaviors can emerge. And I tried to put

some of that into sourdough, but of course, it didn't all fit or didn't all make sense. And I just, I would read some of these books or, you know, articles about microbes and the things they can do, and it would just leave me feeling dizzy. Yes. Oh, the microbes books. And there are a couple out now that are just, how did we not understand that we of the yeast. They have got us so under their thumb. They are just like, yes, human, feed me so that I may grow and reproduce. And we're like, yes, yeast, yes, whatever you say. Tricked us into providing for it. Who domesticated who here? Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Chris, I've been totally hogging the microphone because I have all kinds of questions. Do you have any? Yeah. Well, I noticed, and I haven't dug into this yet, but I noticed following you on Twitter that you have a low-tech artisanal publishing thing, a zine. What are you doing? The kids call them zines. Yeah? The kids call them zines. Yeah, the kids call them zines. Zines, yeah.

This is a new project for this year. It's kind of something I'm adding to my little portfolio of work. Of course, I'm working on a new novel and doing some of these tech experiments, but I also continue to write short fiction, and I know other folks who write short fiction. It is my perception, or my opinion, I should say,

that there are not a lot of really great homes for short fiction, it is my perception, or my opinion, I should say, that there are not a lot of really great homes for short fiction these days. Magazines don't publish it much, and the things they do choose to publish to me are just a little weird. It's not really the kind of stuff that I want to read. And places that publish it online are great, except for the fact that, speaking as a reader myself, I just find it really, really hard to kind of get absorbed by a short story in a web browser. I start with the best intentions every time, but then I get distracted and kind of bail, you know, five paragraphs in. So the project is to present some short stories written by me and many written by others, people I know and like, in a different format. And so you go to the webpage, which is wizard.limo, or you can just search for Penumbra's New Fiction on Google,

which might be easier. Or go to my website and find a link to it from there. And you get two options. There's always one story on offer at a time, just the special of the day. And you can either buy a printed copy from me. I've got a little printing setup here at my media lab in South Berkeley. And they're just these wonderful little simple, humble two-color prints. And I sell them for 89 cents. And you get that mailed to you in an envelope. Or you can print it yourself. And that part of the trick of the website is that it won't actually let you view the story in the browser. It will only let you view it if you press the button to print or hit Command-P. And then it'll come out very happily on your printer.

And you can, you know, enjoy it later offline. Sorry, I'm lost in defeating his technology, which is just not the right. Because I do read everything on the screen. And yet, paper's nice. Paper goes to the beach better. which is just not the right, because I do read everything on the screen. And yet, paper's nice. Paper goes to the beach better. I've been finding that paper is much more enjoyable, but I don't know why yet. I mean, I think it's, again, this is just my opinion, and there's so many different ways to read and enjoy things. So I don't, I would never claim this is true for everyone. But for me, what makes fiction work is a certain kind of dream state. I mean, I think that's what fiction is. That's

what a novel is. I think it's kind of a bundled up dream that you sort of load into your head, almost like a video game cartridge or something like that. And I just think it's harder, not impossible, but harder to kind of boot up that dream state in the context of a crowded web browser full of tabs and, you know, other things trying to get your attention. I think it actually just is easier to kind of get there when you're looking at something on a piece of paper away from the screen. Maybe it's like the 24 frame per second flicker of old film. The whole, you know, the whole gestalt of the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's right. There's other cues, sort of social and cultural

cues, like, this is what I'm doing. This is what this is. Yeah, I think that's right. What question should we ask you? I mean, you do a fair number of interviews and you do readings. Why don't you get asked that you just kind of wish people would ask you? Oh, boy, good question. Well, I don't know if there's a lot. You know, I always enjoy talking about other writers that I like. You know, it's actually a pretty common question, like, oh, who inspired you? Or who are your favorite writers working these days? Because, of course, it's always fun to kind of spread the love around. I think it's important too. It's a way of kind of

keeping the wheel turning. No book can ever exist in isolation. You know, every book kind of trains readers to want more books like that. And at a certain point, you got to switch authors, you got to jump to the next stone in the stream. So I always like talking about other writers who are great. All right. What other writers should we talk about? Oh, boy. I'll name two just because they're top of mind and wonderful. One is a science fiction writer named Anne Leckie. She recently wrote a trilogy of books. The first one is called Ancillary Justice. And they're set in the far, far future, sort of unrecognizable, you know, cosmic civilization

that emerged from Earth, however many tens of thousands of years ago in her timeline. And it's a story kind of, you know, galactic politics, and there's cool military stuff, and there's sort of suspense and somebody gets murdered. But the best thing about it is actually her depiction of an artificial mind. The main character of the book is a ship, actually. It's sort of the mind of one of these great ships. And I don't think it's really a spoiler to say this because it's the first thing that happens in the book. The ship is destroyed as an act of great betrayal. And this mind, this vast mind that's used to seeing the world through all these sensors and all these different eyes is sort of diminished. It's trapped inside one body.

And the story proceeds. It's almost like a murder mystery, actually, a murder mystery in space. But the way she writes about this mind and sort of confronting, like, you got to be kidding me. I just have two hands. Oh, how am I going to make this work? It's just awesome. And there's other parts of the story that are just, it's delightful and kind of dizzying to read. And she put you in the mind, and it felt entirely foreign. Yeah, yeah. It was really cool because you just, it didn't feel like you were in another human's brain.

That's right, that's right. Yeah, she didn't kind of fall into that trap, which is more common than not of, yeah, it's an artificial mind that just so happens to act and feel exactly like a butler or, you know, or like, oh, yes, I am. Actually, I'm really into what I'm looking for is some sexy robots. Like what? No, I don't, I think artificial minds are going to be interested in other things. And she does it. She nails it. It's a, it's a real achievement. It really is. Do you want to give us another one? Sure. There's a writer named Nicola Griffith, who's really, really great. She wrote a book a few years ago called Hild, H-I-L-D. And it's very different from the far future science fiction.

It is set in 6th century England. And it's the story of a woman, a real historical woman, who became a saint at some point. But we don't get to that in this book yet. In this book, she's just part of this kind of, you know, Anglo-Saxon situation. It's this moment in history that was actually really strange and surprising to me. It's definitely not the sort of, you know, Middle Ages of King Arthur and knights and all that and the Game of Thrones sort of vibe. It's because it's real. It's really historical. It's this in-between time. And it's so well told. I mean, it's just, it's one of those books that's completely engrossing. It's big. It's probably 500 plus pages with a map in the front, of course,

which is awesome. And like the table of characters, so you can keep track of who's related to who. And two chapters in, you're just lost. You're lost in Hilde's world, you know, and the natural descriptions, the politics of her world and the different chieftains and who's kind of trying to take control of whom. It is totally, totally enthralling. And it's the perfect winter book. You know, I don't know what the weather's going to stay like. It's kind of been weird lately. We might be out of proper winter. But in any season that is like dark and rainy and or cold, this book is like the book for those times. You just curl up, you make some tea, and you lose yourself in this book. Hild, it's awesome.

Unshockingly to everyone who listens to the show and knows how much I love to read, I now have to go and purchase this book and curl up on the couch. I'm surprised you haven't already read it. Questions, and it was nice to have you, Robin. I'll talk to you. The old abrupt book recommendation ending. So long, gotta go. Seriously, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? We have kept you a good long while, and while I could just stay and stay and ask you to tell me stories,

I feel like we should let you go. Sure. Well, here's a closing thought. It actually connects, kind of loops back around to the beginning and our lightning round, that question about starting things and finishing things. You know, I would just say, and I always say this to people who ask about writing and becoming a writer and all that kind of stuff. It's one of the things that I learned early on that I still remind myself of all the time. Even before I had finished writing these short stories years ago, and that was, of course, before I had written any novels,

I thought of myself as a writer or an aspiring writer. And I would often start things, you know, big things, things I imagined would be big, you know, novels, fantasy, trilogies, all sorts of stuff. Like a lot of people, this is not an uncommon experience. I would kind of get frustrated with how it was turning out. Of course, it wasn't as good as I imagined it would be. And I would kind of taper off and forget about it eventually. And the thing that really unlocked writing as a craft for me was deciding to just finish things. And really what that meant was that things could be short. I had a couple friends that were kind of my writing buddies. We would always meet and swap drafts of things and sort of read stuff aloud to each other. We all liked the same kind of things, the same kind of science fiction and

fantasy and sort of, you know, magical realism and all that. And some of the things I would write for that little group would be like three paragraphs long. But the important thing is that I said it was done. I would start, and it would have like a beginning, and I would have like a very quick middle, and then an end, some kind of end. And I put a title on it. And even though it was just the tiniest scrap of something, to say I was done and then share it with friends, that was it. That was like rocket fuel, because it felt so good. It was the opposite, that was it. That was like rocket fuel because it felt so good. It was the opposite of that sort of draining feeling of like, oh, I guess I'm actually terrible at this and hopeless because I'll never actually finish anything. Instead, you're like, heck yeah,

I finish things all the time. I wrote something that was three paragraphs long, which means I could probably write something that's six paragraphs long. And if I could write something six paragraphs long, I could definitely write something a page long. And if I could write something a page long, I might be able to write something three pages long. And no joke, you can just kind of stair step it up until you're writing short stories and longer stuff, novellas, and then you're off to the races. So I guess my final thought for certainly for people who are interested in fiction, but I think it applies to other kinds of endeavors too, is there's a real freedom and power, like fuel that comes with the ruthlessness of making yourself a really, really tiny project, starting it and finishing it and announcing that it's done. So that's my final thought.

That is very relevant to many endeavors. Yeah, I have a lot of 30-second songs. Yeah, there you go. Our guest has been Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. You can find his books at a bookstore near you, or of course on Amazon. Check out his website, robinsloan.com, where you can read some short fiction and sign up for his sporadic but quite interesting newsletter. Thank you for being with us, Robin. Oh boy, such a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Bookshop Santa Cruz for having Robin come through on his book tour. It was wonderful to meet him. He did not put his neural net outline in my book to sign, even though that's what I asked for. Personalization these days. Of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm. There'll be lots of links. So go ahead and look on Embedded FM this week. And now a final thought to leave you with from me. This one's from Eleanor Roosevelt. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.