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Emily Cox: Hi, this is Emily Cox. I'm an editor here at Audible, and I'm so thrilled to be chatting with Robin Sloan today. He's the bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore as well as Sourdough, and we're here to talk with him about his newest release, the ambitious and wildly imaginative Moonbound. Welcome, Robin.
Robin Sloan: Thank you so much. Oh, boy, it's a pleasure to be here.
EC: Awesome. So glad you could be here. So, I loved this one, but I have to be honest, it was a tricky interview to prepare for because there is so much we could talk about. It was sort of hard to know where to start. My 13-year-old daughter has been watching me listen to this book over the last few days, and she's like, "What's this all about?" I was like, "Everything. It's about everything."
RS: [Laughs]. That's a good answer. Yeah. That'll be the new blurb.
EC: Yeah. Blurb me. I actually played her some of it. Now she's listening to it. But I think, most fundamentally, it's sort of about storytelling itself. I mean, that seems to be the theme that I was feeling so much of. So, with that in mind, I wanted to start with the character who narrates the story, which surprisingly, to me, he was actually kind of the least strange. He was the most familiar character, even though he's an AI, unnamed, but called the Chronicler. So, I just wanted to hear a bit about how you developed him, and when you were writing this, did you know that AIs were going to be as prevalent? That it would be the theme of this year?
RS: Yeah, two-part question there, and both parts are so rich. I'll take them on in order. First, the Chronicler, our narrator, who in some ways is also kind of a protagonist. Not entirely passive. An observer, but also an entity that kind of wants certain things to happen. I would call that voice a bit of a hack. And I mean that in a positive way. I guess a nicer way to say it might be “an innovation.” Well, let me back up just one step. My first two novels, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, both feature a first-person narrator. And that's just because that mode always came more naturally to me. It's also because I've always, myself, really appreciated the energy of that mode and just the seamless way that thoughts and opinions and reactions can kind of braid with descriptions of what's happening in the story and in the fictional world. It's great. What an awesome tool to have.
Of course, anyone who's read a lot of books or maybe tried to write some knows [first-person] also has these really sharp limitations. You're trapped inside a mind, and you can't do the thing that the omniscient narrators do, which is jump around and suddenly, cut, you're a thousand miles away or on another continent, or whatever it is. And obviously there's a lot of fictional and storytelling opportunities in those kinds of transitions and cuts. So, I guess you could say I kind of set myself the challenge to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to have the richness and personality of that first-person narrator, but I also wanted it to kind of do the thing that a lot of modern fiction does, I think especially literary fiction, sometimes called the free indirect style. And it is a third-person narrator, but one that is sitting so close, kind of almost on the shoulder of a character, that it kind of almost phases in and out of those character's thoughts.
So, of course, having read the book and experienced the narrator, you can kind of understand what all that means. It might sound a little more theoretical or abstract for people listening to this, but the upshot is, I think I hit upon something really cool with a lot of energy but also a really, really broad canvas for explaining a lot of this weird—you know, it's a story that takes place 11,000 years in the future, so you have a lot of explaining to do. And I think this narrator technology allowed me to do that.
Now, in the fictional world of Moonbound, it is an AI, or at least partially AI. There's some other kind of components built into it. And the answer is I did have an inkling that it was going to be a big part of our world now. In fact, for years now—many, many years—I've been doing my own experiments with using some AI tools in writing. I have to confess that, like, five or six years ago, I was pretty sure I was going to write a novel with AI tools, sort of cowriting it in some way. As it turned out, and this was really through a lot of experimentation and tinkering and practice, I discovered that that wasn't actually very much fun [laughs]. It just wasn't. It never produced the results that I actually was interested in myself, but the process was totally valuable and totally fascinating, just because I learned so much about those technologies, the systems, the real nitty-gritty, the guts of how they work. And so I took the most interesting and poetic bits of that and put them into this story.
EC: Really interesting. So, Moonbound does feel like a departure from your other books, both in terms of scope and timeline. I mean, your last two books were roughly present-day San Francisco, or maybe a slightly more intriguing San Francisco than in reality. But Moonbound is set 11,000 years in the future, where everything's entirely different, yet it also goes way back in the past, tugging on those threads of myth and archetype. But I've also read this has been sort of positioned as existing in the Penumbra-verse. So, I wanted to just kind of hear your take on that, like, how it sits in the space of your other books.
RS: It was interesting to me, actually, and maybe you could even say surprising to me to see where my intuitions and my desires, really, as a writer took me. To back up one step, and talk about Penumbra and Sourdough, I think most people who read them, while, of course, acknowledging that they are notionally realist fiction set in our real world and there's no magic—maybe some strains of kind of science fiction and the future present, that sort of story set 15 minutes into the future. Even though that's really the genre that they fit into, I kind of think everybody who read them could tell that this guy really likes science fiction and fantasy. It just is clear. There's an homage and an adjacency that, of course, I didn't really try to hide it in any way, but it just comes to you really clearly on the page.
"I wanted to try to write something that could maybe sit on that shelf beside The Chronicles of Narnia and The Books of Earthsea and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials."
In particular, there's this thread that runs through Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, where the protagonist, he has a favorite set of books from his youth. And in the book, they're called the Dragon Song Chronicles, which are sort of perfectly generic. And it's supposed to be Lord of the Rings or the Dragon Lance Chronicles or the Chronicles of Prydain, or any of the books that I read as a young person that meant so much to me. Again, it's an Easter egg or a kind of homage. I decided finally I wanted to do more than homage. I wanted to do it. I wanted to try to write something that could maybe sit on that shelf beside The Chronicles of Narnia and The Books of Earthsea and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. And it turned out that when I confronted that idea or that aspiration, of course it was intimidating, but it was also really, really exciting, so I just decided to go for it.
EC: Yep. Narnia is in there. That's so interesting, all those that you mentioned, yeah. I mean, this was the most Narnia moment to me, the beavers. Everyone online's talking about the beavers. For our listeners, they run the regional offices of Shy Flight and Shadow Tackle, which I just love that. I had to Google it. I think I found out it's from a poem somewhere. I love it. It rolls off Gabra Zackman's tongue every time she says it.
RS: Yes, yes.
EC: It's so good. It's a multipurpose firm, but their main job seems to be to manage carbon. And then they also settle disputes through collaborative sculpture.
RS: Naturally [laughs].
EC: Am I just asking the same question over and over again? Like, "Where did this come from?" It was the most fascinating resolution process I've ever seen, and I just wanted to hear about where you pulled this from.
RS: Yeah, well, actually, this is where, of course, it's all connected. It cannot help but be connected because you live a life in the real world in a real place. You mentioned before that my first two novels were set in a somewhat heightened or exaggerated version of San Francisco. But San Francisco by itself is pretty heightened and exaggerated. And in particular, years ago, really shortly after I moved here in the 2000s, I became aware of a long-running lecture series. I should say it's now been long-running. At the time, it was new. And they were called the Seminars on Long-Term Thinking. It was organized by a sort of a think-tank institute here in San Francisco. And so with a few of my friends, I started to go. And honestly, it just blew the top of my skull off. It was incredible to see or to hear and kind of think with all these folks they brought in. And we're talking about historians, geologists, biologists, astronomers. The occasional science fiction novelist too. They just were working on projects that considered stretches of space and time that were so much bigger than, you know, your breakfast and the city in front of you.
I found it totally electrifying, and they had a format. They used it only a few times, at least in the years that I was going to the seminars. But they would put on debates. And I'm going to describe the debate format to you and to your listeners. It will be novel, but you'll recognize it because you just read about it. The debate format goes as follows: Arguer A presents their case. Arguer B presents their case. But then we toggle back, and Arguer A has to articulate Arguer B's case, just sort of a summary, a recapitulation, but they have to do it in a way that B agrees is fair and correct. And then to return the favor, B does the same thing for A. And that's kind of scary, right? You're there in a debate. You're butting heads, and this is stuff that really matters. It could be about politics and justice and the fate of the Earth, all sorts of big stuff. Nuclear energy. Who knows? And you've got to articulate the very thing that you think is so wrong.
"In my mind, the sentient sourdough starter from 'Sourdough' is 100 percent the ancestor of the Chronicler in Moonbound."
It turns out it's really thrilling to hear people do it, to essentially extend that offer of incredible good faith. It's like, even if you're going to disagree with someone, you ought to be disagreeing with the very best, most formidable version of their argument, not with the worst and kind of cruddiest. So, I saw a couple of these years ago, and obviously it left a mark, because I went, “I think my sort of somewhat utopian future custodians of the Earth, maybe they'll use a system like that themselves.” So that's where it came from.
EC: Yeah, I think I might introduce this to my children. I just really wonder if that might work among disputes. “Who deserves the ice cream?” But I did love the idea of the sculpture too.
RS: Yes, yes. I've been influenced in recent years by a whole host of books—and I could name a couple—that really take seriously other kinds of minds. It was a hard thing to do, hard thing to even think about because we kind of have one kind of mind, the human mind. But I think it's a cool and worthwhile thing to contemplate. And so I did. I set myself the challenge, thinking about the beavers. I mean, these are creatures who today, in the real world, their instinct is fully three-dimensional. It's about matter and building things, and so I reasoned or speculated that future beavers—because in the book they can talk, and they do all this other funny stuff—but the core of their discourse would probably still be connected to that deep instinct, which is 3D. And it's about form and sculpture, so that's what they do.
EC: That was great. So, on sort of “where do all these ideas come from?” how much planning goes into your writing? Do you plan this all out? Is it bullet-pointed? Is it outlined? Or are you more of, like, I think they call it “pantsers.” Are you a seat-of-your-pants writer?
RS: I'm somewhere in the middle, and I think most people are. Even the writers who claim to be full planners, or full pantsers, for that matter, I always get a sort of "They doth protest too much" vibe. I think the reality of any sort of fictional composition has to include both. I have to say, I was radicalized relatively recently, because I was reading these really, really nerdy volumes that are about the early composition of The Lord of the Rings. They're edited by Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R's son, and actually sort of his literary partner in a lot of ways. And they go through successive drafts and transformations of these books. And the ones that are focused on The Lord of the Rings, the book itself, are revelatory. And it's for this reason: Tolkien is revered as the great planner. I mean, he, they say, I believed, figured it all out ahead of time. He had the languages, he had the mythology, he had the world, he had everything. The deep history. He just wrote this little story as kind of a window into that stuff that he had spent so many years building.
True, sort of. When he sat down to write The Lord of the Rings—and you see it, no one can object to this—on the page, it's all over the place. And from draft to draft, he is inventing things from whole cloth. Whole characters had never occurred to him before, and suddenly, there they are on the page. Aragorn, the son of Arathorn. Galadriel. They come out of nowhere, and of course, anyone who's read the books or watched the movies knows they're the very essence of those stories. So, I kind of went, "Wait a minute. You're telling me the great planner, the ultimate architect and outliner, he also was just making things up and discovering them as he went?" Not only in the course of writing through this story, but then revising it. Layering, layering, and layering. So, I guess you could say that's what I did. And the truth is, I kind of think that's what everybody does, to some degree.
EC: Did you have any moments where you found a problem? You were like, "Oh, whoops, I have to take a left turn. This isn't working."
RS: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. The differences in some of your early drafts are so profound you almost want to show them to people because they'd never believe it. But, of course, you don't want to show it to other people either, because they're so terrible. I definitely feel that way about some early, early versions of this story.
I think a lot about to what degree certain parts of stories are arbitrary or not. Would a thousand different Robins writing this book, revising this book in a thousand different timelines, have arrived at certain things in common? I think the answer might be yes. I think there are some inevitabilities in the way that some of the stuff came together. And, of course, that feels nice. You want it to feel like certain things kind of had to be the way they are and they weren't just the fact that you didn't have lunch that day or whatever.
EC: I want to talk a little bit about one of the, not a smaller character, but maybe more of a side character, who was my favorite: Clovis. I just really loved his voice. I love the way he talks in the present tense. He's both many beings and one. And it seems like, but especially looking at this held up next to Sourdough, that you're really interested in sort of poking at the differences and similarities between sort of multi-slash-plural beings and singular beings, like the Chronicler, who is actually a multicellular fungus, right?
RS: Yeah, yeah.
EC: So, I just sort of wanted to hear about the inspiration behind Clovis and more about your interest in this.
RS: Yeah, I'm very glad you picked up on that, because it is an interest-slash-preoccupation, really. I think part of the catalyst for me has been the realization over the last maybe decade or decade-plus of the importance of our own microbiomes. You know, that we actually are plural in a lot of ways. There's whole books you can read about that, and so I won't go into all that stuff. But it turns out that's really important, and that we ourselves, even though we do operate with the singular “I,” we imagine the singular “I,” it might be a convenient illusion in a lot of ways. And I think that leads you into some interesting speculation about other ways of being “I.” I mean, to go back to the Chronicler, one of my personal favorite little sections in it, it's almost an aside, is early in the book, where the Chronicler kind of establishes that they're going to use the word “I” even though it's completely incorrect. And the Chronicler says, "Well, I mean, I know I'm not an ‘I.’ But, man, I like the ‘I.’ I like the ‘I’ of English and of storytelling, so I'm just going to use it. So here we go."
And that's kind of how I felt about that. In terms of associating sort of this story, which is so distant and so, so big in so many ways, back to the sort of closer-to-home stories of Penumbra and Sourdough, I didn't make this totally explicit on the page, so maybe this can be kind of like a special Audible podcast Easter egg, but in my mind, the sourdough starter, the sentient sourdough starter from Sourdough, is 100 percent the ancestor of the Chronicler in Moonbound. There's a direct lineage there. And I like imagining that connection.
EC: Oh. I definitely picked up on the bit where it's, "Somebody described me as a sourdough starter in a mech suit."
RS: Yep, that's right. That's right.
EC: I mean, on this same thread, you are also probing at the fine line between alive and not alive. Like, there's a talking sword who, I'm not sure if he has an interior life but he's definitely alive in some way. I was wondering, when you look around your world, do you anthropomorphize a lot? Is that a preoccupation?
RS: That's a great question. I do, of course. Because I think it's hard not to. I would say I'm probably trying to, mostly failing, but still trying to not anthropomorphize, and recognize things upon their own terms, or sort of understand things on their own terms. I'm not alone in this. I really think there's a slow yet very steady sort of cultural and aesthetic shift happening. I think you see it with the great interest in forests and the ways that trees might talk to each other. Of course, it's just, like, dizzying. But also, there's this challenge that I think more people are taking on, like, "That's weird. Okay. But I'm going to try to look at the trees and see that or feel that."
"Through all my books, I have been interested in the puzzle of: How do you write a captivating story, one with real suspense and real drama, without playing the easy trump cards of death, dismemberment, and that kind of stuff?"
There's two books. I mentioned this earlier, but just off the top of my head, books released in the last couple years that have been really important to me in this respect. One is called Ways of Being. It's a nonfiction book that just maps out a lot of different kinds of thinking that can happen in this world. Everything from plant intelligence to computer intelligence, with, of course, all sorts of animal intelligences in between. And then the other one is a science fiction novel called The Mountain in the Sea, and I think there's actually some straight inspiration for Moonbound there. Not in the sense of replicating the themes or even the vibe. But rather just of taking on the challenge and saying, "Okay, you're going to put six different kinds of minds on the page. Well, I can do that too." Or at least, you know, I’m going to give it my best shot.
EC: There's a vast arena of animal consciousnesses in this book, or maybe they're humans, maybe they're not. I thought that was so interesting. And I don't want to dig into that too much because I don't want to spoil anything about the book. But one thing, and I hope this isn't a spoiler, I have been ruminating on the last few days is what's missing in the novel. I mean, I think all the characters agree that the birds are missing. That's the thing. And the Chronicler finds that a bit creepy when he realizes. But I think I'm right in saying this. It seems like the other thing that's missing is any sort of concern about mortality.
RS: Yes. Yeah.
EC: And I thought, like, that was wild to me. How do you create a world where that's not a deal?
RS: Right. Well, you know, two parts to that. One is, I have, through all my books, I have been interested in the puzzle of: How do you write a captivating story, one with real suspense and real drama, without playing the easy trump cards of death, dismemberment, and that kind of stuff? The three-alarm fire of fiction. Because, obviously, that works. I mean, what's better than a murder mystery? Murder at the core of it, or people in real bodily peril. And of course, not to dismiss any of those books or to pretend that that kind of peril doesn't exist in the real world, it just always seemed to me that my life doesn't have too much of that kind of peril very often. And it still feels very interesting and dramatic, at least to me. And so I thought, "You know, there's got to be ways to have adventures on the page while kind of keeping things in a different band of, I don't know, stress and danger." And as a writer, any kind of game you can play with yourself on the page is just useful. It kind of gives you some constraints, and a little box to color inside.
So, I kept that going with Moonbound. I wanted it to be, frankly, a book that a precocious 12-year-old could read and their parents wouldn't have to worry about blood and guts and weird stuff. That was one of my overall meta objectives. I think it's a worthwhile challenge, and I think it's maybe an important thing to offer as an alternative on the shelf.
EC: Yeah. That's a great way of putting it. You have created drama and tension without a cliff someone's going to just topple over.
RS: As I'm thinking about it more, it reminds me of the work of Iain M. Banks, a terrific science fiction writer, passed away quite a few years ago now. But he wrote a series of loosely linked books, all about a fictional, obviously far-future civilization called The Culture. And this is another sort of, you know, tens of thousands of years in the future. And really, really beyond Star Trek, far beyond Star Trek in the scale and scope of its imagination. And one of the features of those books is a really different relationship to mortality. He actually does have plenty of danger and blood and guts and suspense and all that kind of stuff. But the table stakes of life in this far-future world is you don't have to die if you don't really want to.
What’s fascinating about those books, and what has always fascinated me, is that it seems like that ought to be the end of drama. You're like, "Oh, so, wait, does anything matter?" It turns out it totally does. These are people who live in—and many commentators have noted this and agree on this—the Culture of Iain M. Banks, it's a kind of utopia. I mean, it sounds awesome, the potential and the access you have to energy and time and space and any kind of creative project you want. It's phenomenal. And it's still really interesting and exciting. I guess you can say in the hands of a great writer and a great storyteller, there's nothing contradictory about that. And I've always found that just so interesting and so inspiring.
EC: Right. Well, and you say utopia, would you describe Rath Varia as a utopia?
RS: Yeah, maybe. Rath Varia, the city of transformations, yeah. What's the tourist guidebook paragraph on Rath Varia? Would be like, "Here citizens can become whatever they want, whenever they want. And nothing holds back their smallest whims and desires, and they follow their curiosity wherever it goes." Even in that articulation, I actually think there's a pretty obvious double-edged sword. There is such freedom and potentiality. And also, I kind of tried to lace this into the vibe of some of the characters, there's some fecklessness, you know? Our protagonist comes to the city, discovers all of its strange wonders. But he's looking for somebody to help him with a really tough task. And nobody in Rath Varia steps up to the plate.
EC: No one's interested.
RS: Yeah, they're like, "Conflict? What? No. Just move somewhere else. Just change your life." And so I think there's complexity there. But I think utopia, utopia-adjacent, is almost exactly right. In a sense, I want to make all the locations in this world at least somewhat adjacent to a utopia. Although all of them then end up having these drawbacks or these flaws, or just things that make you go, “Hmm.”
EC: So, I wanted to talk about the audiobook of this. Gabra Zackman, she brings such a great combination of whimsy but also she can do this nongendered voice, which really works for all of the characters. How much of a role did you play in casting her? And what were you looking for in a narrator?
RS: Well, luckily and happily, I did play a role in the whole sort of casting process. It was a very interesting and, for me, very illuminating experience in terms of defining what kind of narrator we even were looking for in the first place. In the very, very early days, I had it in my head that maybe I would try to narrate the book myself. This book, more than the others that I've written, is just really close to my heart. It's the kind of book I wanted to write for a really long time, and for that reason, I just kind of felt, "Well, maybe I'll do it. Maybe it'll be my voice enlivening these words." The audiobook director at Macmillan said, very diplomatically, real kind of professional, like, "Hold on. Well, you can audition." [laughs]. "But let's consider alongside some other alternatives."
And so my initial sense of what kind of voice the Chronicler would have, keeping in mind this is a creature that does not have a human gender at all, so to even say it's ambiguous isn't right. It's like, what gender does a tree stump have? Indeed, what gender does a sourdough starter have? So, it's up there for you to decide, and my initial instinct was for sort of the classic voice of the storyteller, a masculine voice. I think I even did say maybe a voice with a British accent. Maybe that's a little embarrassing to admit. But I just thought of the grand storyteller. And of course, I thought of some of the Arthurian themes that are present, especially earlier in the story. We got the auditions back, and they were all terrific. I mean, so rich and accomplished—and obviously wrong. It just wasn't the Chronicler. I mean, you could hear it. Everybody agreed, including me. I, of course, had submitted my audition as well and had to agree that I was the worst of the bunch, so we were off that. We were onto the next thing.
"This book, more than the others that I've written, is just really close to my heart. It's the kind of book I wanted to write for a really long time."
So, anyways, we went back out with the idea that actually maybe my instinct had been wrong in the first place. In fact, I asked a few other folks, some early readers, "You know, when you imagine that voice in your head, that weird cosmic voice of the Chronicler, what kind of voice did you hear?" And a couple of them said, "Oh, I heard a woman's voice very clearly." So, we went back out. One of the auditions that came in was Gabra Zackman's, and as soon as I heard it, I thought, "How lucky that the little twists and turns here let us arrive at this place." Because she was and is perfect for this role.
EC: Yeah. I love her voice for Ariel as well. It's so sweet. But hopeful.
RS: And I'll say too—we're talking in an Audible context here, so we could go very, very nerdy, or maybe this is too much—but as a listener myself to audiobooks, and as I considered the way this one would work, I discovered that the really, really, really transformative performers—and I heard a few auditions like this—you couldn't actually believe it was the same person. They would do their performance, their rendition of the Chronicler, and then they'd switch into some lines of dialogue, and you'd go, "Huh?" I mean, it was sort of an incredible use of the voice as an instrument. I thought I didn't like it as much as, again, what I think of as sort of the storyteller mode, where it still sounds like one person telling you a story. It's a person who's a real professional, and they're in great command of their voice. I guess you call it a continuity, or maybe just being a slightly more low-key rendition. And I just discovered—I wouldn't have known that beforehand. I wouldn't have understood that I had that opinion—but I discovered that that's the kind of narrator I like best.
EC: So, you are an audiobook listener. What are some of your favorites?
RS: Well, my absolute favorite looms so large that it's like looking at the sun. It blots out all the rest. And I'm sure these are familiar to folks in your universe, but the full-cast renditions of the His Dark Materials books, which I believe are more recent. Obviously, the Philip Pullman books came out years ago. And I don't know exactly when these were produced, but I think it's somewhat more recently. I listen to those. I have some other work I do that keeps me on my feet and walking around, for hours in a lot of cases. And it's perfect, perfect audiobook territory. And I listen to those, and I was as transported as I've ever been with any medium of anything. I mean, up there next to movies and performances, whatever. And if folks enjoy the Philip Pullman books and have not listened to them, please pause this podcast now and go get those downloading, because it's just such cool work. And Philip Pullman himself is the voice of the narrator in that case.
EC: Right, right. There are several books, especially science fiction and fantasy, where we will have a single-narrator version and a multicast narrator version. And I find, personally as a listener, it just extends it for me. Well, I think my final question for you is, what's next? And I think I'm asking what's next that you're working on, and what's most interesting you right now?
RS: Well, Moonbound is intended, or I should say, imagined as the first in a series. So, what I hope is next is the next in that series. That's going to be contingent on the success of this first book, so I hope people buy it and download it and read it and listen to it and love it and tell their friends about it. Because if there's evidence of a readership out there who would be onboard for a continuing story, I am ready and I'm raring to go. I know exactly where I want the story to go next. I know exactly how big I want it to get. And I would love the opportunity to write a trilogy.
We were talking about Philip Pullman, and I just think of what he was able to achieve with His Dark Materials. Or something like the Chronicles of Narnia. You can have such fun in stories told over time in that way. It's not just, "Oh, it can be longer. I have access to more pages." It's actually fun because you get to live in the story over time, alongside all the people who are reading it. So that's what I hope is next. I have every confidence that I'm going to get that opportunity. And so, hopefully, stay tuned for Moonbound book 2.
EC: Well, I think that does it for today. I've had so much fun talking with you. Thank you so much, Robin. And listeners, be sure to pick up Moonbound by Robin Sloan on Audible today.
RS: Thank you so much, Emily. It was just a delight to talk about the book with you. Thank you so much.