Stories About Our Time: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore
How do we construct narratives about the digital age? And what themes and ideas will characterise ‘dot com fiction’?
“Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore” is a cracking work of short fiction written by Robin Sloan, one of the three people behind what is probably my favourite blog, Snarkmarket. Characterised by Sloan as “a short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation”, the piece is part fantasy, part sci-fi – and all good. It’s also possibly one of the few pieces that would fit Margaret Atwood’s otherwise condescending term ‘speculative fiction’.
For good reason, much of the reaction from the ‘sphere has been glowing praise. So far, however, I haven’t seen much in the way of a literary or analytic response. And while there are many people who argue that ‘analysing’ literature is to deny the pleasure of reading, I’ve never found it to be the case. The more I love a work of fiction – the more it works that strange, inarticulable magic on me – the more I enjoy diving into it and expressing all of the things it made me think.
So what follows are some of my scattered thoughts about the story. It will spoil the story if you haven’t read it, so you might want to do that first; it’s both very quick and well worth the half-an-hour of your time. And for those of you who, like me, have real problems with your attention spans, there’s a great audio version on Escape Pod that makes a bus ride so much better.
So:
- The paragraphs are short. Like a good blog post, the story is full of quick, punchy graphs. The prose too is very clear, but in 1st person. I don’t think this is a story that would have made sense with long paragraphs of description written in 3rd person omniscient. I think there’s a reason for that.
- The conceit of the story is, of course, that books and their readers are hiding a secret and that the protagonist teases it out using computers. Put another way: the aggregation of information in books by computers reveals a piece of information (or, content) that ‘supersedes’ its forms.
- This happens via a three-dimensional visualisation of ostensibly ‘two-dimensional’ texts. The clear implication is that, though Penumbra intends his face to be found, it can only happen through print’s ‘successor’.
- No. Wait, that’s wrong. It’s not that the information can only be found using computers; it’s that it can only happen so quickly using computers. That it has happened so fast means a change has been initiated. It’s not that print has been rendered obsolete; rather, it’s function and position in society has changed.
- The description of the Google campus and the book scanner seem to reinforce this idea; “Mr. Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore”.
- Yet, the text goes to great lengths to neither celebrate nor prioritise computerization over print; in fact, there is a suggestion that while computers are great at giving answers they, like all other forms of technology, aren’t so great at asking questions.
- Another way of framing that idea might be: digital information can be organised in non-linear, constantly shifting ways; but in order for that information to remain relevant to people, those networked systems of thinking have to simultaneously become textual (i.e. ‘a text’ is an ordering of signs meant to render something comprehensible). For information to have meaning, there must be a constant blurring print and screen, narrative and database.
- I can’t tell if it was deliberate, but there are a couple of points at which the main character seems to be saying something, but there are no quotation marks. Collapse of print and speech? A textual gesture to a new post-textual mode in which writing becomes performative? (Am I just getting silly now?)
- Of course, the way the text ends is neither a celebration nor a condemnation of print or digital; it’s something else. On the one hand, the immense power of digital is on display; on the other, its fleetingness, its tendency to evaporate the moment it has been created is all too clear as well. But Penumbra also suggests that longevity – to make something that lasts – isn’t the sole domain of the book. So we’re left with the contrast of a particular set of values and investments and their technological predications.
- So it’s interesting that the text rests on ideas about the author: on one hand, the Google Book Scanner peels information off the page and turns it into impersonal data, a fitting digital metahpor for the death of the author (neat point: the death happens for the same reason as it did ‘in Barthes’: language/information operate independently of their author); on the other is the idea that an author speaks, and lives through speaking. After all, the main character tries to understand Penumbra by ‘piecing together’ the information he finds about him. The fellowship is about sustaining life through passing yourself on through books. Is the author dead? Or does something about the endlessly iterative nature of digital texts do something to the now clichéd post-structuralist idea? (though it’s worth pointing out that Foucault’s idea of the author function is still at work here – and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing)
- At the end of the text, the protagonist wonders how he will make himself last and, half-jokingly, mentions “Super Book Store Bros.”. What’s interesting about that, is that the video game is (to me, anyway) the next phase of narrative. Maybe that’s exactly the thing that will last (assuming, of course, that narrative doesn’t become less and less relevant).
- The piece is a story about historical transition, a moment in time between two epochs (in Western societies, anyway). It seems hopeful. This pleases me.
There’s more to be said, of course. But even I get tired of my own overly-simplistic wankery sometimes. If you wanna’ chat about this in the comments, I’d be totally up for it.
More notes. If you somehow don’t know, Robin used this story as a springboard to write a whole book. You can find out about it – and possibly contribute? – here. As part of the project, Robin, almost on a dare, also wrote a story on his flight from SF to NYC. As someone who has had a couple of unfinished stories kicking around for 3 or 4 years now, this makes me feel totally at ease with myself… 
My major critical complaint w Penumbra ( which I voiced to Ro immediately after reading) is that the Kat character is disposed of much too summarily. She deserves her own chapter or at least her own sentence.
Wd be very interested in your thoughts on gender in Penumbra – one thing that will be more prominent in new book, w/ female protagonist (plus gender/ed/less AI)?
“It’s not that the information can only be found using computers; it’s that it can only happen so quickly using computers. That it has happened so fast means a change has been initiated. It’s not that print has been rendered obsolete; rather, it’s function and position in society has changed.”
“The fellowship is about sustaining life through passing yourself on through books. Is the author dead? Or does something about the endlessly iterative nature of digital texts do something to the now clichéd post-structuralist idea?”
What is the goal of Penumbra’s challenge? Is it to decipher the mystery — or to produce a lasting work?
There’s a way in which the digitization of the text liquidates its own possibility – but points the way to something else.
That thing would not be a fellowship. Think about the recessional nature of the story. You cannot become an initiate into a small group of men who play games and live forever. postindustrial, postintellectual (or at least a certain kind of industry/intellectuality).
The Narrator loses the permanent faculty position his work wd deserve (under old conditions). Instead he gets – a severance, a grant?
Always such good comments Tim. Whatever happened, I hope your recovery proceeds smoothly and quickly.
1) Kat seems very much like a helper character; and in that sense, I suppose the story repeats the gendered tropes of silicon valley. You’re right – some perspective from Kat on issues of textuality/the author etc. might have been nice, particularly since that latter thing can be pretty gendered.
2) The fellowship, while dedicated to books, is also somehow sustained by capitalism – the books have to be purchased, and the sense of transition invoked seems to suggest a crystallisation or intensification of late capitalism. Google is, rather than the benefactor on high – the church, the freemasons, whatever – is at the core of an economic shift that organises information so that it can be monetized. Google are the paragon of late capitalism.
3) So the weird thing is that piece invokes a world that fractures the book and, consequentially, fractures the self, as it insists that the author-self has to find a way to reassert its presence. (ruh-roh).
It seems the challenge is to make something that lasts; what’s cool about that is that it becomes this textual gesture toward an ideal of permanence, written into a story that many people received using a system called ‘Whispernet’.
So this is pretty ambivalent: is the idea of permanence at odds with the ephemeral nature of the digital? Or does the text deliberately make a futile gesture toward solidity as a kind of polemical call-to-arms?
See, the strange about digital is that, for example, some random tweet I wrote two or three years ago is still floating around somewhere. If I do a vanity search, it pops up. So it’s that intensely iterative nature of the web-as-public-text that still fascinates me.
One phrase that comes to mind is – “the circle is no longer closed.” Tyndall calls the fellowship ““A brotherhood bound by binding!”which suggests the kind of heroic-bourgeois-humanist capitalism of early print intellectuals. They only swap money amongst each other. But that circularity keeps away the exploitative and disintegrating effects of capitalism.
“Some would say our society has, ah, devolved,” Penumbra said, “for we now read only the books written by our membership. Books which are filled only with observations of other members. And references to other books filled only with observations. And so on.”
Now – the circle is not closed. Which means it could become a big funnel to siphon value. But unlike the age of late media, tv etc. there’s a humanist and closed-circle ethos in a lot of the digital and web culture. Patronage and piracy can coexist in a way that neither can w/ capitalism. New possibilities.
‘Now – the circle is not closed. Which means it could become a big funnel to siphon value.”
What’s interesting about this is that to many web-heads, value always means exchange value. But it sounds like you’re talking about use value – as you say, the closed circle of exchange keeps away the exploitative effects of capitalism.
Have had a conversation of this sort with a friend about torrent groups – this constant exchange of art for ‘the sake of it’ seems somehow analogous.
I do wonder about the cultural exchange in the not-closed-circle though. That line by Penumbra seems to suggest that book culture created a kind of cultural insularity or narcissism. But the economic concerns responsible for that kind of cultural centralisation – all the money’s here, so all the good stuff happens here – seems to have intensified. I always kinda’ go back to Buzzfeed on this: all ‘other’ cultures are there for entertainment, for ironic reflection (“It’s funny because their clothes are different from my clothes”…).
No, maybe not ‘book culture’. More the concomitant rise of capitalism. But then, that can’t just be a coincidence, can it?
Whoah! How did I miss this ’til now?
These are wonderful notes. And a great thread here. Thanks, Nav.
@Tim, re Kat: Totally agree. A Mr. Penumbra 2.0 will give that character space to flex & play.
@Nav, re point on capitalism: That’s brilliant, and provides an opportunity to get into something really interesting. Honestly I hadn’t thought through the why-are-these-books-so-expensive angle at all; it was totally half-assed. But I’m going to file that away — again, for 2.0.
P.S. Yes, the lack of quotation-marks for the narrator’s voice is deliberate. And your analysis might, in fact, be getting silly, but I like it
I actually wasn’t 100% disciplined with it throughout — there’s a spot near the end where the narrator speaks in quote-marks — and I think I want to fix that.
One more thing. I was just looking at the story (confirming that I was remembering that line near the end correctly) and it occurred to me: Is there anything other than Mr. Penumbra saying “my boy” that indicates the narrator is male? I mean, formally. You can infer from the tone. But I think that’s actually pretty interesting, right? Hmm. Might be fun to expunge that, and leave it (again, at least formally) ambiguous.
You’re quite right, Robin – there is no other explicit indication of the narrator’s sex (gender?). I guess I just assumed. Maybe it was a ‘tone’ thing. I’m not really sure. Maybe I just fell victim to that common mistake: conflating the author and the narrator.
I really dig this idea of a story 2.0 . In your post, you asked whether people do that. I think the key word there was ‘released’. I don’t think that people really *release* multiple versions of stories. That’s a really neat idea – different iterations of the same story, and one I’d love to see.
I think I wrote about this before re: Raymond Carver. There, I argued that new versions would somehow be better when they slashed rather than added. I can’t quite remember why now, but here’s the link:
http://scrawledinwax.com/2009/07/31/the-electronic-book-more-through-less/
The message is the medium!