(2024-02-27) Sloan Leverage

Robin Sloan: Leverage. I’m just back from a couple of weeks in Japan. I’ve traveled there many times, and the trips, for all their diversity, always orbit a central feature: THE ONSEN. Hot springs. Public bathing.

In the onsen, you are naked; everyone is naked. You see other bodies — every other kind of body. You learn the etiquette. I don’t quite have the words to articulate the value of all this — when I do, maybe I’ll write a story set among the onsen — but, suffice it to say, if you find yourself in Japan, don’t overlook this opportunity

Rustic hot springs are grand; even better, somehow, are matter-of-fact urban bathhouses.

Moonbound update: the power of the preorder

A bestselling novel might have sold, in the previous week, copies numbering in the single-digit thousands. That is, in one sense, a ton of books! But, in most other senses — the Netflix sense, the Spotify sense — it’s tiny.

You can read this as paltry; you can read it as cozy; you can read it as opportunity. I choose the latter. Because success compounds! When a novel hits bestseller lists, it becomes a story

And what began with single-digit thousands grows: into a multiweek bestseller, a series of bestsellers

With novels, you can get to the really big numbers through the very small numbers. It feels like a cheat code for culture. Really, it’s just leverage.

So: let’s talk about the bestseller lists, and those single-digit thousands

Preorders are all counted in the first week of a book’s publication, regardless of when they were placed.

I want to really launch this book of mine

So! I will now ask you to preorder Moonbound

My goal is to tally 3000 preorders from the readers of this newsletter—a number that would put us very solidly on our way toward the bestseller lists.

Reward, enticement, appetizer, collectible — this launch zine is intended as all of the above. I’ll print it on my trusty Risograph, two or three colors on toothy paper.

For readers who have been to Japan, or who enjoy thinking about Japan, here are some book recommendations:

Embracing Defeat, by John W. Dower, chronicles the immediate aftermath of surrender and occupation. The encounter is political, economic, and cultural

Ametora, by W. David Marx, unfolds a couple decades after Embracing Defeat, and plays in a softer key. It’s the story of how American midcentury fashion was metabolized and remade by Japanese enthusiasts. Turns out, that link explains the global menswear aesthetic of the 2010s, only recently on the wane. Elegantly sized and scoped, I think this is a nearly perfect nonfiction book.

Mystery novels provide another example of a genre ping-ponging across the world, essential features sharpened with every bounce. This example predates the war: Japanese fans devoured the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and others as soon as it was available.

Pushkin Press has been translating short books by Seishi Yokomizo, whose detective Kosuke Kindaichi is a sort of sloppy Sherlock Holmes. The Honjin Murders, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a great place to start.

“Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era into the Douglas Adams era,” says Matt Webb. There’s your frame for the 2020s.

I recently discovered Catherine Lacey’s 144-word essays—perfect little packets of language. Here is one example. Here’s another. They’re so great!

Here is Adam Savage’s ecstastic tour of his recently redesigned shop in San Francisco — now home to the last fugitive scraps of the legendary ILM model shop. You get the sense that for many of the mechanically-enthusiastic — the home drill press operators of the world — the shop IS the work. The artwork, almost. All the little projects, no matter how elaborate, are just excuses to keep the big one going.

Here is a tour of Philip Pullman’s desk. The world map on the far wall, spied with binoculars, is EXACTLY what you want from such a scene: wacky and appealing. A theme emerges, creative people inventing their own strange spaces and processes …

Sam Valenti’s writing continues to orbit the question of canons: digital canons, 21st-century canons; the lack thereof, mutant forms thereof. It is really good, provocative stuff.

What a pageant of people and ideas, here in Jordana Cepelewicz’s history of the Mandelbrot set for Quanta Magazine.

Was Dracula defeated by garlic and silver? No, no, not at all, says Alan Jacobs … Dracula was defeated by modernity. I love this so much: But Dracula’s biggest mistake is to enter the world of technocratic modernity.