So we inevitably talk a lot more, and exclusively, about language, words and meaning – although Sloan doesn’t think it was inevitable that language would become a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology. It could have been a vision, he says; it could have been something else. But now this Is language and now this This he can write, he is excited about the possibility of being a writer like machines cannot be. Just look Associated with the Moon, which comes out today and is Sloan’s first true science fiction work. He thinks it’s his best-written and best-sounding book to date – by far. It is certainly his most ambitious work: thematically, characterologically and even punctually. I point out his innovative devotion to colons, and he launches into a defense of sentences containing not one, but two, which ChatGPT would obviously never do.
Earlier that day, at a nearby junkyard, in a section devoted to hundreds of elderly doors, Sloan told me about the different paths his writing could have taken. (Surrounded, I repeat, next to the door. Sliding doors. Narrow door. Glass door. Metadoors, metaphors.) In 2010, the same year he launched Twitter, Sloan self-published three tiny stories on his website: one fantasy, one science fiction, and one set in modern-day San Francisco. The one that just took off – and then became a staple Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore, which was released two years later, shortly after Sloan left Twitter, was nominally realistic. That’s why for some time he thought he was just such a writer. Sourdough, which followed five years later in 2017, also took place in SF. He gave a talk at Google somewhere and became something thing in these parts, beloved by educated professionals who saw him as a writer who understood both the incredible wildness of technological culture and how to novelize it.
I employ the phrase “nominally realist” because: Sloan was never completely competent. Penumbra has a rather technomistic approach to books, history and the power of Google. Climax Sourdough concerns a giant bread monster at a futuristic food fair (a few years before the Covid-era baking craze). In other words, both books had science fiction stories trying to break free. IN Penumbramany characters literally read books about dragons, and there is a scene where one character challenges another to imagine a sci-fi story set many thousands of years in the future.
Associated with the Moon The action takes place many thousands of years in the future and there are many dragons in it. There are also wizards, talking beavers, and feeling swords. Sloan’s hero, Ariel de la Sauvage (“a strange name,” Sloan writes; it’s self-awareness at the very bottom) is an orphan boy living in a castle whose destiny is to draw the sword from the stone. “I knew this story,” the AI narrator says, but “here it had a different shape, compressed and reworked.” It loops. It overlaps.