“Sourdough” mixes high tech with old ways
Robin Sloan is taking the long way to Denver for his book signing event at the Tattered Cover this week — by railroad. Traveling the scenic route from San Francisco by rail fulfills a longtime wish for the techsavvy author, who has a fascination with the old ways of doing things.
Sloan will read from and sign copies of his sophomore novel, “Sourdough,” a follow-up to his bestselling debut, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” (Picador, 2012), with some themes that will feel familiar to fans.
Both stories are set in the San Francisco Bay area and follow young tech-industry professionals who find themselves the unexpected keepers of ancient and mysterious secrets — stories involving the kinds of scenarios that any reader who loved “The Hobbit” or enjoyed “The Da Vinci Code” will appreciate.
In “Sourdough,” burned-out robotics programmer Lois Clary finds herself the unwitting owner of a crock of sourdough starter when her favorite dinner delivery service abruptly closes and the owner gifts his “Number One Eater” with a portion of his special ingredient. Having subsisted largely on a slurry of nutritive gel before the Clement Street Soup and Sourdough menu appeared on her front door, Lois is determined to keep the starter alive and learn how to bake fresh sourdough bread for herself.
However, she soon realizes this starter is no ordinary mix of flour and water. The wild yeasts and bacteria that live within the glutinous mix respond to a certain ethnic music (Mazg) and form telltale shapes in her baked loaves.
When Lois finds her newfound baking skills in growing demand, she puts her programming knowledge to use in designing a robotic arm to mix dough and automate the process. As the pressure to produce rises, Lois seeks help from an increasingly odd cast of characters, including fellow members of the local Lois Club, a group of women who all share the name that peaked in popularity in 1929 (according to babycenter.com).
With “Sourdough,” Sloan has written the kind of story you might expect from a 37-year-old self-described “library kid” who is equally into dabbling in machine learning and artificial intelligence as he is his new venture of producing extra virgin olive oil.
“I am comfortable combining the old and the new,” Sloan said. “It’s an interesting space to play in, and in putting the old thing in a new setting I hope to show how the old is actually really high tech as well.”
While San Francisco is arguably the North American mecca for sourdough bread lovers, Sloan is looking forward to tasting the Rocky Mountain version when Golden’s Grateful Bread Company co-sponsors his book signing with samples of their own celebrated sourdough for people to taste while they wait for an autograph.
In shifting from a background of journalistic writing for the likes of The Atlantic and Motherboard to fiction, Sloan, who also worked for Twitter, is playing with ways to make the process of writing novels a mix of imagination and automation with a software he is developing. He’s perfecting a program that operates like an AI co-writer, offering suggestions to writers much the way texting apps offer words to help speed up the process of phone messaging.
“I will be able to use it, not in my next couple of stories, but maybe in book number five,” Sloan speculated. And if those stories play out the way his first two have, they will feature a blend of fantasy and reality, with a juxtaposition of contemporary and vintage technologies in starring roles.
“I like to take little bits of my own experience and remix them into some kind of fictional storyline, using some things that are straight up real, some that are exaggerated, and some invented together in a way so people can’t really tell what’s made up and what isn’t.”
Oh, the possibilities.