Sourdough
by Robin Sloan · first published 2017
77% recommend23% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A light, fun satire of San Francisco tech culture about a coder who takes up bread baking and gets drawn into something strange. Suits readers wanting a short, quirky novel mixing technology and food.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her; feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but she could use a
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This seems like an appropriate place to plug Sourdough: A Novel, by Robin Sloan (who also wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore). It's a really delightful read that lovingly satirizes many aspects of San Francisco's contemporary culture while telling the…
on “Monitoring the Fermentation of Sourdough Starter with Computer Vision” ↗I read the book Sourdough by Robin Sloan a few months back. Your anecdote reminds me of it! You might enjoy reading it -- it's a fun/quirky mix of technology and bread, set in SF. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024-sourdough
on “Where is everyone getting all of this sourdough starter?” ↗…is focused on everyone's own experience with this, but can I just recommend Robin Sloan as a human in general for folks to follow in their lives? His 2 novels, "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore" and "Sourdough", are both really engaging reads. His 3rd novel is in progress and it seems like it's going to be more of the same quality. He also has a couple of novellas and a bunch of great short stories (some of…
on “An odd discovery on Spotify” ↗One example in the positive column: Robin Sloan has consistently written optimistically about SF, both in Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, and his new novel, Sourdough.
on “The Rise of Dystopian Fiction” ↗Anyone that’s interested in this and looking for a good short fiction read, pick up Sourdough by Robin Sloan. It’s a fun little tale set in the Bay Area about someone who picks up bread making as a hobby and things get weird.
on “Make your own sourdough” ↗…happen to enjoy very much include David Mitchell (Thousand Autumns or Bone Clocks FTW), Cory Doctorow (Makers, Walkaway), Blake Crouch (Recursion), Daniel Suarez (Influx, Delta-V, Daemon), Robin Sloan (Sourdough, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore). Just to wrap up and repeat what has no doubt been said elsewhere in the thread, fiction in particular is the gateway to empathy and imagination. Reading is a muscle;…
on “Ask HN: Are books worth it?” ↗Required (fiction) reading for anyone interested in this space: "Sourdough: A Novel" by Robin Sloan. It's fantastic!
on “They Just Don’t Listen': SF Kimchi Maker Saw 'Food Tech' Practices Up Close” ↗Thank you for the Robin Sloan link, I've been a fan of his ever since I read Sourdough for a book club a few years ago (incidentally while learning how to make my own by total coincedence) and his style really resonates with me. That blog was an interesting take and I've definitely experienced…
on “I no longer build software” ↗I would expect nothing less from Robin Sloan! I absolutely loved reading "Sourdough." https://www.robinsloan.com/books/sourdough/
on “Spring 83: a draft protocol intended to suggest new ways of relating online” ↗I loved Sourdough by Robin Sloan, will check out this one too.
on “Ask HN: What are some good inspirational and uplifting books?” ↗Lab-grown lembas? Excellent news. (See also: "Sourdough", by Robin Sloan.)
on “Hacking the genome of fungi for smart foods of the future” ↗Legacy Fleet Trilogy Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)
on “U.S. kids no longer reading for pleasure” ↗The book "Sourdough" by Robin Sloan touches on eating bugs a bit, as well as some other fun futuristic food concepts. Also, it namedrops pretty much everything that exists in the Bay Area, so that's kinda fun.
on “The Rise of Edible Insect Farming” ↗In the novel Sourdough by Robin Sloan, a woman leaves her job programming robots to nurture a mystical sourdough starter. https://www.robinsloan.com/books/sourdough/
on “The Bread Code – Make Your Own Sourdough” ↗Only loosely related, but Robin Sloan also wrote a truly excellent article about using neural nets to produce music: https://www.mcdbooks.com/features/sourdough In his book Sourdough, he spends quite a while describing the music of the Mazg - a fictional group of European migrants. For the audiobook version of Sourdough, he trains a SampleRNN model on a particular…
on “An odd discovery on Spotify” ↗