The Pickle: A Conversation About Making Digital Books

9: That Oracular Feeling

One thing I learned from my OmniBlarp years is that there are some seriously literary minds lurking in those open-plan offices. (By that, I mean both “people who appreciate literature, a lot” and “people who seem like characters out of novels.”) A glimpse: just as I was starting, the world’s fevered blarping was threatening to overwhelm the capacity of standard database software, and a pair of programmers at the next desk over had been charged with developing a more robust way to generate unique IDs for blarps. Listening to them scheme and theorize, they didn’t sound like two coders in San Francisco; they sounded like two philosophers in Athens. “What does it mean to name a thing?” Fantastic.

For me, as a writer, overhearing those conversations was delicious. And then, slowly, I started to learn things myself; started to dip my fingers into some of those humongous systems. The feeling of composing queries that would run across the entire corpus of blarps… I found it oracular. I tried to explain that sentiment to programmer colleagues, and their response was split 70% “you are weird” / 30% “yes, at last, someone understands.”

Which is about the same response you want for fiction, right?

But part of the point here is that working with technology can be not only a means to an end — a lunge for efficiency, or scale, or wealth — but an end unto itself, because it can conjure feelings that are unique and interesting. This is the sense I get from Russell’s description of his process, too.

I will never work at an OmniBlarp again, but I think I probably recommend doing it at least once, particularly — or maybe only — if you can spend time in proximity to the philosophers. There’s a rich vein of fuel for art and fiction there, sitting mostly untapped.

The Indexed Pickle

1. Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
2. Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
3. Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
4. The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
5. Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
6. The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
7. Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
8. Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
9. ➡ That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
10. Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
11. The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
12. Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
13. At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
14. Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]