Robin Sloan writes about machine learning, but he's writing with it, too. His 2017 novel Sourdough has been hailed as one of the best and most accurate novels about machine learning ever published. In the wake of that book, Robin also built a little bot that will help you write science fiction by autocompleting your sentences with phrases taken from a massive corpus of sci-fi stories. At the next Ars Technica Live, we'll be talking to Robin about the reality and fantasy of machine learning, as well as what it means to write in the age of bots. There will be plenty of time for audience questions, too.

In this day and age, under our current political conditions, you'd be forgiven for mistaking lightness for triteness, escape for escapism. There's a sense that our fictions should be of Earth-shattering import in the obvious ways, and this perhaps desensitizes us to other examples of subversion and narrative. It may also make us miss out on some great fiction about odd bread, an imaginary country and the processes behind making robot arms. All of which is to say that Robin Sloan's delightful new novel, "Sourdough," the follow-up to his runaway success "Mr. It is that rare thing: a satire that has a love of what it satirizes while also functioning as a modern fairy tale about, of all things, the magic of certain carbohydrates. For this to be a chemical rather than physical reaction, Sloan must display a sure and natural knowledge of high-tech culture and of bread culture (in both senses). His keen insight into both automatons and organic foods stems from his immersion in the San ...