Sourdough

This book is about Lois Clary, a tal­ented young pro­grammer from Michigan who fol­lows a job to Cal­i­fornia, only to be drawn into the weird world of food that waits there. It’s about work and eating, robots and microbes, inde­pen­dence and ambition,

and

I believe it is the first novel in Eng­lish to feature, as a key sup­porting character, a sen­tient sour­dough starter.

The great Cory Doc­torow praised the book for cov­ering

so much terrain: micro­bial nations, assim­i­la­tion and tradition, embodied con­scious­ness and the crisis of the tech industry, all without losing the light, sweet, ironic Sloanian voice familiar from Penumbra, a plot that makes the book a page-turner and a laugh-out-louder, with sweet­ness and romance and tart­ness and irony in per­fect balance.

Writing for NPR, Jason Sheehan said of Sourdough:

It is a beautiful, small, sweet, quiet book. It knows as much about the strange extremes of food as Penumbra did about the dark lat­i­tudes of the book community.

The Suitcase Clone

Bun­dled with the latest MCD edi­tion of Sourdough, you’ll find a short prequel. The story is set between Cal­i­fornia and Europe, circa 1986. It’s a glo­be­trot­ting caper that car­ries us into the rar­i­fied world of wine, and not just any wine, but the kind made from grapes left to rot by design. There are rumors of a grape, long thought vanished, that has reap­peared in Italy, its north­ern­most edge … so Jim Bas­cule is sent to steal it. He has never stolen any­thing before; he barely drinks wine; but his heart has just been broken, and he’s up for any­thing. Off we go!

And, an Easter egg for Penumbra readers: this story clar­i­fies Sourdough’s con­nec­tion to the Penumbraverse.

Along the way, we’ll learn more about a cer­tain charis­matic goop.

November 2022, Berkeley