THE TECH WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING NOVELIST GOES META

In which Robin Sloan writes Moonbound-a science fiction book about science fiction-and our writer writes his way into total insanity.

- JASON KEHE

DEEP INTO MY many-hour hang with the tech world's greatest living novelist, Robin Sloan, he says something profound about science fiction. It's the insight I've been waiting for, the key to understanding not just him but maybe all of storytelling.

I glance down at my voice recorder, just to make sure it's on. "Memory is full!" it says.

Full! With that mocking little exclamation point. I do not panic. Instead what happens is: I simply go insane. Part of me stays there with Sloan, chatting about sci-fi. The rest of me is, I don't know how else to put this, yanked, as if by some cosmic cartoon cane, offstage, into the other-dimensional wings of reality, where time is irrelevant and space sort of fizzles. In that realm, I know my task: to come up with a way to write this profile, or perish.

It's fine, I say to myself. Everything is fine. So what if you don't have Sloan's exact words? You can paraphrase. And you won't even need to do that, at least not at first. In the intro paragraph, just say there IS a profound insight. Classic way to entrap the reader.

Well, unless the reader doesn't know who Robin Sloan is. But that's an easy fix too: Just give him some impressive-sounding title that can't be ignored.

"The quintessential Bay Area author," say-but less local. Or "the programmer writer's programmer-writer"-but less esoteric. Oh, that's it: He's "the tech world's greatest living novelist." (Which is, maybe, actually perfectly true. How many other novelists do you know who live in the Bay Area, and used to work at Twitter, and have extremely nerdy websites, and code for fun? And don't techies love his stuff? People book clubbed his first two books everywhere.) So you have a beginning, I say-again, to myself, off in who-knows-where. But you'll need to do one more thing. You'll need to establish, high up, that Sloan loves going meta. Does it constantly.