On the Line: Sci Fi, Poetry

▰ SONIC SIGNATURES:

“The roll-out had clearly been long prepared. There were Black Horizon explainers for every level of interest and education: a tranche of science papers and political briefings for the most engaged; documentaries fronted by avatars evoking a century's worth of trusted and beloved science and natural history communicators, their voices carrying digital echoes of Sagan's plosives and Attenborough's aspirates; comic books and animations for children of various age-groups; pictorial leaflets, even, for the dwindling but still globally significant strand-line of illiterates.”

“Sagan’s plosives and Attenborough’s aspirates” — I love it. That is Ken MacLeod in Beyond the Hallowed Sky, the first book in his Lightspeed trilogy. And l love this reminder that included among the sounds of nature are the trademark sounds of the people who tell us about nature..

. . .

▰ PHONE ODE:

"So much past arrives on my screencoupled with soft pings in the pocketstrange temple bellAnd in these images pass chords of facesof which I know next to nothingwhile all fall I ride the 63 line from Moynihan to Rhine cliffalongside passengers slumped with buds in their ears"

That is about a quarter of the poem “I Can’t Stop” by Jenny Xie, published in the June 20, 2024, issue of The New York Review of Books.

. . .

▰ WHALED AT:

“The girl wriggles out of his grasp, stands up straight on tiptoe, and makes a sort of moo-meow sound while doing a slow pirouette. It's her whale impression. I laugh, and she looks at the screen with bright eyes, enjoying the attention. She makes the whale-song again, this time spinning away, her feet slipping on the kitchen floor. The moo-meow fades into the next room.”

That is Robin Sloan writing in his 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which I reread this past week in advance of his brand new novel, Moonbound, which I picked up at Green Apple Books earlier this evening (after dinner around the corner at Spices). In this scene, the story’s protagonist-narrator is on a video call with someone. The girl is that someone’s daughter. When she learns that the narrator lives in San Francisco, she announces, “I like whales!” Her dad encourages her by asking, “What sound does a whale make, sweetie?”