Sourdough by Robin Sloan
A new novel by the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is as good as I hoped it would be. Sloan lives in the Bay Area, and is obviously part of the “magical stuff happens in SF” school, along with Christopher Moore and many others over the last century of American literature.
Sourdough recounts the story of Lois, who moves from Michigan to work developing software for robots. The job is technically challenging, if philosophically suspect (they aim to “eliminate work”, whatever that means), but the long days and social isolation are sucking her dry.
Sloan gives us all the weirdness of the tech scene, and its hard to tell what, if any of it, is satire. The guy who has no kitchen, but a large touchscreen interface to food delivery. “Slurry”, the nutritive gel which they enthusiastically eat, despite free food from a gourmet chef. And so on.
Lois’s adventure begins when she discovers a local delivery service that delivers weird, but very good soup and bread. When the brothers have to leave town (visa issues), they gift her with a batch of their sourdough starter.
This being San Francisco, the starter is far from normal. Lois is surprisingly cool about the astonishing and mysterious behavior of her sourdough culture–I would have fled in terror if my bread dough behaved that way!
Rather than freak out, she is inspired to learn to bake bread. This turns out to be a life-transforming exercise. She is good at problem solving, and technically savvy, but life in a SF tech company is sucking her life away. Baking brings her back to life.
She is also determined to track down and understand the extremely unusual sourdough culture. This quest leads Lois into a strange adventure in the wacky world of food and “food technology” in the Bay Area. She meets some very interesting people, and becomes involved with a (literally) underground project out on Mythbusters’ Island.
Things happen. Mysteries unfold. Lois heads into new adventures.
It’s all good fun, and, as in Mr. Pembrook, Sloan both groks technology and points us toward a human and humane life. We laugh at the portrayal of “wraiths” in the technology slave pits, but it’s not really funny. It’s very sad. This novel joins the growing body of non-fiction (Lanier, Turkle, Greenfield, Wolfe, and many more) and fiction (Maum, Shafir, Miller, and others).
I loved this story, and look forward to more from Sloan.
- Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012.
- Robin Sloan, Sourdough, New York, Farrar, Strauss, and Grioux, 2017.
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Robert McGrath's Blog 
Thanks for the great review! I must read this book–particularly because I bake sourdough goodies at home. I’m giving away starter all this month, so perhaps Sloan’s book will inspire you to play with sourdough too. 🙂
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