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This week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound, one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and raises questions like:
Where is the line between technology and magic?
What is a computer, really, and do humans qualify?
How wrong might we be about the future?
How do stories shape reality, and what happens when we have to make room for the stories of the more-than-human world?
A crucial point of note: this is “hard science fiction”, but it’s not the kind you’re used to. At a time when even the most square, prosaic suits are quick to quote Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, it is appropriate that sci-fi as a kind of thinking-through of our condition would reflect the cultural retrieval of premodern tropes like wizards, dragons, talking animals, and sacred swords.
What follows is a rich discussion of how Robin and I both enjoy traversing and interrogating those familiar boundaries between the lost and found, the sensible and the ineffable, wildness and city, born and created, sleep and waking, care and power…
Project Links
Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
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Chapters
0:00:00 – Teaser
0:01:38 – Intro
0:06:50 – Robin’s Story
0:08:35 – The Care and Feeding of AI
0:13:38 – Magical Technologies vs. The (Other) Powers of Nature
0:21:46 – Persistent Wildness in The Post-Apocalyptic Future
0:28:57 – Mapping Everything & Getting Lost
0:32:30 – The City of Transformation: Ephemeropoli from Burning Man to Rath Varia
0:37:48 – Tuning Longevity to the Duration of our Interests
0:41:49 – The Loss of Self in Data & The Metamorphic Self
0:49:02 – Beaver Governance is Better Governance
0:54:23 – Living Robots & Sleeping Institutions in Liquid Modernity
1:02:16 – How Do We Keep Healthy Rhythms While Scaling?
1:10:35 – Life at The College of Wyrd
1:18:01 – Recommendations for Good Discussion & Book Takeaways
1:23:09 – Thanks & Outro
Mentions
Eliot Peper (Re: FF 47, 115)
Eliot Peper’s interview with Robin Sloan, “Binding The Moon”
Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits
Tim Morton’s Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology
The Long Now Foundation
Kevin Kelly’s “The Expansion of Ignorance” (Re: FF 128, 165, 204)
Star Wars
Tyson Yunkaporta (Re: FF 172)
Adventure Time
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park
Jack Vance
M. John Harrison
Herbert Simon
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State
Richard Doyle’s Darwin’s Pharmacy
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue)
Neil Gaiman’s Long Now talk “How Stories Last”
Jonathan Rowson/Perspectiva’s antidebate
The Templeton Foundation
Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
Alexander Rose
Johan Chu & James Evans’s “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science”
Michael Garfield’s “The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, and Economies of Scale”
Erik Hoel’s “The Overfitted Brain”
JF Martel (Re: FF 18, 71, 126, 214)
Phil Ford (Re: FF 126, 157, 214)
Erik Davis (Re: FF 99, 132, 141)
The Weirdosphere
Bell Labs
Magic: The Gathering
Complexity Podcast 42: “Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West on Calling Bullshit”
Inna Semetsky’s “Information and Signs: The Language of Images”
The I Ching
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)
Iain McGilchrist
Claire Evans
James Bridle
Quanta Magazine
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