259 pages
English language
Published Nov. 2, 2017 by MCD.
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 roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens …
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 roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.
When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?
A quirky take on a tech tale in San Francisco. Worth reading if you care about those things, the specific local moments are the things that I remember. It was a wonderful bedtime book.
As I've become a sourdough enthusiast myself, I found the existence of this book intriguing; a story about a woman robotics worker living in Silicon Valley, who starts experimenting with sourdough, obtains a 'mother' from an exotic ex-boyfriend, becomes involved with privately-funded underground project based in an abandoned military base, where various 'mad scientist' types research their bleeding-edge food technology, working towards the opening day of the ultimate exotic food market - sourdough, but also crickets, slurry grown from fungus, etc.
I enjoyed it, but on reflection, the fact that the plot could be encapsulated as "woman programmer discovers that actually she prefers baking" left a sour taste. And that was before I discovered that the author, Robin Sloan, isn't a woman as I had assumed.
This book is another one with the focus on a collection of quirky characters, set in fantastic situations grounded in a plausible base. Like his preceding book Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore it is set in a recognizable San Francisco among tech companies, this time focussing on the startup scene rather than one of the megacompanies, but crossing this with the foodie obsession which is a real thing here to try to come up with a story that relies on both. There are many kinds of tech startups, but this one is in the robotics space so he brings in just enough information about the concerns that engineers working with sensors and manipulators have, enough to make it seem realistic. The food angle comes from two sources, the superfocused ethnic cuisine which pops up here and there in certain neighborhoods, and the farmers' markets featuring all kinds of artisanal edibles. The …
This book is another one with the focus on a collection of quirky characters, set in fantastic situations grounded in a plausible base. Like his preceding book Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore it is set in a recognizable San Francisco among tech companies, this time focussing on the startup scene rather than one of the megacompanies, but crossing this with the foodie obsession which is a real thing here to try to come up with a story that relies on both. There are many kinds of tech startups, but this one is in the robotics space so he brings in just enough information about the concerns that engineers working with sensors and manipulators have, enough to make it seem realistic. The food angle comes from two sources, the superfocused ethnic cuisine which pops up here and there in certain neighborhoods, and the farmers' markets featuring all kinds of artisanal edibles. The main character finds herself traveling from the first world among software engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs out of central casting towards the second world on account of a literal gut-level pain that she find needs to be addressed. In the foodie ecosystem, moreover, there are good elements acting in good faith to bring good ingredients and traditional techniques to bear on their edibles in a straightforward fashion, and there are more sketchy elements who obsess about one or another feature of their food and blow it up into their all. These latter types might be just harmless maniacs or they can grow out of proportion, so, it turns out, can sourdough starter.
I enjoyed the audiobook, although I feel as a native I do have to make one observation about the remarkable Thérèse Plummer's pronunciation of "Clement Street" which is not the same as the way San Franciscans say it. I was able to rationalize this away by concentrating on the fact that the first-person narrator is a transplant from Michigan and didn't grow up hearing it that way. Cabrillo Street I'm less sure of. One of the reasons I snatched up this Audible book is because of how much I liked her work on the audiobook of The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis.
I rather enjoyed this book, though I found myself thinking of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore a bit more than I'd expected to. I know it's a shared universe and all, but Lois Clary (the protagonist from this book) felt a little too much like Clay Jannon (the protagonist from Mr. Penumbra) to suit me; maybe R.S. just has a taste for that type of hero, I dunno.
That said, it was a fun little romp, with just enough fantasy to make the mundane feel a little bit magical.
