THE METAMORPHOSIS OF STORYTELLING: JOURNEYING WITH ROBIN SLOAN THROUGH THE LABYRINTHS OF METAFICTION

In an age of 21st-century digital rebirth, when time and space bend between meat and machine, the voice of the tech world’s best living novelist hums with a strange new frequency.

EXPLORING THE META UNIVERSE WITH ROBIN SLOAN

Sloan’s turn with me was my initiation into the world of metafiction, where stories about stories unfurl before our eyes, untangling meaning as they plait it together, refusing to settle for the two-dimensional flatness of a simple narrative. His kind of fiction is writerly – it’s like a programmer has created a code in which agents interact, causing unexpected events on a uni- or multidimensional playing field.

ROBIN SLOAN: THE WRITER AS A TECHNOLOGIST

Sloan is one of the few tech-age bards spinning yarns of imagination and hardware on the loom of our new lore – and what a specifically Bay Area lore it is.

THE ART OF GOING META: SLOAN'S NARRATIVE CRAFT

Sloan’s stories are a brash approach to the metafictional idea. ‘The best movies are about movies,’ says Sloan of his approach. ‘The best books about books.’ Indeed, his novels, Moonbound (2011) and Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), are testaments to the mantra. They lure the reader deep into the maze of story itself.

ROBIN SLOAN AND THE CHRONICLE OF A MEMORY LOST

One of my most memorable moments with Sloan is a traumatic, tragicomic one: losing an important interview moment to a full memory card. But it also led to a thought experiment on recordings: Can the spirit of an encounter be translated, in some way, through the medium of metafiction? Sloan laughed affirmatively. Anything’s possible with narrative.

THE BOUNDLESS REALMS OF ROBIN SLOAN'S FICTION

In Sloan’s *Moonbound*, we travel to a universe that simultaneously amplifies familiar literature to a new and thrilling heights, and adapts it to become something new, all through attention to thematic, character-driven storytelling. As stories seek to break down genre barriers, the narrative swells and becomes a breathing, living dream.

THE ECHOES OF METAFICTION IN MODERN STORYTELLING

Before I gave up on Sloan, the worlds of fiction and non-fiction became more interrelated, echoing the meta that runs through his whole oeuvre. If fiction and non-fiction are more similar than one might think, perhaps the act of storytelling itself is all that counts. As readers, we might gain some perspective on how stories influence how we see the world.

UNDERSTANDING ROBIN SLOAN

His name is Robin Sloan. He is a novelist, but he also represents the wide-eyed possibility at the intersection of the new technology and the old. As a writer who can code and a coder who can write, Sloan previews the vanguard arts and practices at the bleeding edges where stories are neither told nor read but lived in a way we’d scarcely considered possible. There aren’t many people better positioned than Sloan to peer into the near future and see how our relationship to narrative must change as narratives themselves change shape. Sloan sees their empowerment through codes to become living stories that can create content, play with time, reinvent itself, and talk back to the reader.

As the line between artificial intelligence and human imagination expands, Sloan — perhaps without realising it — is heralding a future where narrative not only speaks to our understanding of reality and fiction, but can be a medium for that self-exploration. In the age of digital stories, Sloan might be the tech world’s greatest living novelist — but he is also its greatest guardian of the future of storytelling.