Robin Sloan

“I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something. I could start with the starter.”

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wond...”

“When you do something a little bit extreme or weird, it helps make it more interesting and more amenable to being written about.”

“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.”

“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, the...”

“When you close a tab or when you finish an article on the web, it's gone unless you go back into your history or search for it or explicitly try to find it. Apps on your phone have this spec...”

“For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you're staring at the page and...”

“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 you...”

“Primes seem to me to be these unarbitrary, unique, fated things. It cannot be coincidence that the mythical numbers of storytelling like 3, 7, and 13 are random. The lower-end primes have in...”

“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...”

“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...”

“I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainme...”

“'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American...”

“This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.”

“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.”

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

“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 an...”