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
- Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
- Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
- Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
- The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
- Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
- The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
- Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
- Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
- ➡ That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
- Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
- The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
- Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
- At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
- Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]