So inevitably, we're going to talk a lot more, and meta, about language, words, and meaning. Sloan doesn't think it was inevitable that language would be the breakthrough AI technology, though. It could have been vision, he says, or something else. But now that it's language and we can write, he's excited to be a different kind of writer than machines. Take Sloan's first proper sci-fi work, Moonbound, which comes out today. He thinks it's by far his best-written, most human piece of work to date. It's certainly his most ambitious work, thematically, character-wise, and punctuation-wise. I point out the creative obsession with colons in this work, and he launches into a defense of sentences with two colons instead of one. Of course, we never do that in ChatGPT.
That day, in a section of a nearby junkyard where hundreds of old doors are on display, Sloan talked about the different paths his writing career could have taken. (Again, surrounded by doors. Sliding doors. Narrow doors. Glass doors. Meta doors, metaphors.) In 2010, the year he started working at Twitter, Sloan self-published three short stories on his website: one fantasy, one sci-fi, and one set in modern-day San Francisco. It was a nominally realist novel that served as the basis for Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which happened to be popular and was published two years after he left Twitter. So for a while, he thought of himself as that kind of writer. His follow-up, Sourdough, five years later in 2017, was also set in sci-fi. He gave a talk at some Google, became a kind of buzz around the area, beloved by educated techies who saw him as a writer who understood both the amazing things in tech culture and how to fictionalize them.
I use the phrase “nominal realist” because Sloane never fully qualifies. Penumbras has some pretty techno-mystical stuff about books and history and the power of Google. Sourdough's climax features a giant bread monster at a futuristic food fair (a few years before the COVID-era bread-making boom). In other words, both books had sci-fi stories about freedom-winning. In Penumbras, multiple characters are literally reading books about dragons, and there's a scene where one character challenges another to imagine a sci-fi story set thousands of years into the future.
Moonbound is set thousands of years in the future, and there are dragons galore. Wizards, talking beavers, and sentient swords. Sloan's protagonist, Ariel de la Sauvage (“a lame name,” Sloan writes, but there's an underlying self-awareness to it), is an orphaned boy who lives in a castle and is destined to pull the sword from the stone. “I knew this story,” the AI ​​narrator tells us, “but here it was different, compressed, reworked.” The story is loopy and multi-layered.
