Quotes from Robin Sloan

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.

Without science fiction, without the influence these books have had on me over the years, I'm not sure I would care much about reading or writing today.

'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 novels.

My parents live in northern Michigan, and every year, in the summer, we visit them for a few weeks.

Selling books is hard to engineer.

You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore.

I saw the short stories people were doing on Kindle and really liked the idea of seeing something I'd written on that screen.

Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness.

I think I'm one of those people that kind of thinks everybody's got an identity, and maybe that's the core of their personality. But I think we change enough over the years that it's like a succession of different people.

Print books have an amazing superpower because they don't disappear when you're done with them. Books on the shelf remind you that they exist.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -- low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.

I am comfortable combining the old and the new.

Baking and coding involve using the same parts of your brain and a lot of the same skills, like being able to follow directions or create directions in a very systematic way.

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 special property: they hang around. In some ways, they're more like a book on a bookshelf than they are like web pages.

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 entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

Social systems have values - arguments baked into their design. For example, Twitter's core argument seems to be, 'Everything should be public, and messages should find the largest audience possible.' Snapchat's might be, 'Communication should be private and ephemeral.'

I think, personally - I don't know if other readers would agree - but reading 'Penumbra,' I detect an Internet writer or a writer who came up on the Internet.

I got a bike - a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can't let that stop you.

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

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

I was always a computer kid, and I grew up with the Internet and always found it fascinating.

You can really find yourself at sea when you're becoming an adult and suddenly have to feed yourself for the first time.

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 it worked, change more words, and so on.

When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.