Robin Sloan Quotes

I liked the sort of YA classics. I loved ‘The Chronicles of Narnia.’ I loved ‘The Chronicles of Prydain’ by Lloyd Alexander, who is amazing. Basically, ‘Chronicles of’ – I was in.

There’s just no escaping it: The half-life of media on the Internet is super short. Tweets flow and fade; pages that look great today will be gone or, at best, riddled with broken links and outmoded code in five years, tops.

I want to learn to weld.

For so long, the model for writing has been, you sit in a room alone for a number of days or weeks or months or years and figure it out. But now, you don’t have to do that; you don’t have to be alone in the room anymore.

I think that some of the archetypes and works of science fiction that have pierced pop culture and stayed there are the darker ones and the dystopias.

I think one of the most exciting things about the whole digital side of publishing is that it eventually allows you to operate at any length. That also means shorter stuff, too.

In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.

There’s certainly satire written about techies, but it’s so snarky and snide and doesn’t treat him as a whole person. The people I worked with at Twitter – they’re very analytical, but they’re also deep and thoughtful – I feel like they deserved a charismatic spokesperson.

Books and technology are braided together and always have been.

When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the Internet, but not the Internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the World Wide Web existed, it wasn’t generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn’t have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web.

It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways – and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways.

Selling books is hard to engineer.

You can go as far back as fifth grade, and you will find me tinkering with media and computers, making things that are a little off the beaten track.

In the case of ‘Fish,’ I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I’d change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on.

Good writing is really meaningful, and it’s one of the – it’s still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people’s attention.

The stimulation I get from my phone does not feel like the opposite of boredom to me. It actually feels like a different flavor of boredom… a twitchier flavor. And sometimes, it’s almost more irritation than stimulation. It’s an itch.

Prediction just means you saw where the world might be going: ho-hum. Influence, though – ah. Influence, direct and acknowledged, means you actually steered the world, even if only a tiny bit.

I think I’m one of those people that kind of thinks everybody‘s got an identity, and maybe that’s the core of their personality. But I think we change enough over the years that it’s like a succession of different people.

Print books have an amazing superpower because they don’t disappear when you’re done with them. Books on the shelf remind you that they exist.

We range widely, we readers of fiction, but I think we all need a home. Mine is science fiction. It’s my home shelf, my homeland, my home planet, my essential genre.

If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside.

Without science fiction, without the influence these books have had on me over the years, I’m not sure I would care much about reading or writing today.

On the Twitter media team, we believe that tweets drive TV tune-in.

People tend to think of the quest as a sort of fanciful or fantastical form, but actually, I think it’s pretty realistic. I think that story of gathering allies to your side – recruiting your band of companions – actually matches the shape of most great careers, most great lives.

What is a game like ‘No Man’s Sky,’ really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that’s inert without the trigger of human attention.

When you’re writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they’re in. You don’t have to be selling them on every page.

My parents live in northern Michigan, and every year, in the summer, we visit them for a few weeks.

Social systems have values – arguments baked into their design. For example, Twitter’s core argument seems to be, ‘Everything should be public, and messages should find the largest audience possible.’ Snapchat‘s might be, ‘Communication should be private and ephemeral.’

It’s not like ‘Print versus Digital – only one will survive.’ We live in a hybrid world now, and I think the near-term future is also hybrid.

For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was ‘D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.’