Monday, February 03, 2025

Sourdough

A Novel
By Robin Sloan

A definite first—for me at least—a book whose main character is an exotic strain of yeast!

Lois Clary works at a software programmer for a San Francisco company that is developing industrial robots. She is over-worked and frazzled, subsisting on manufactured food—‘slurry’ with her only respite being delicious food she orders from a shady local delivery service. The sandwiches she devours are made of delicious sourdough bread and she befriends its makers, brothers of a mysterious ‘Mazg’ ethnicity, who have visa problems. They have to leave, but they gift her with the special sourdough starter culture that starts her on a road of discovery.

The story is set in the bay area—there are even two maps showing the locations in the story. Because it is set in and around San Francisco, her experiments are, of course, successful and soon she is invested in the food scene there and even manages to finagle one of the robot arms to help her make the bread (and make that other kind of ‘bread’.)  The sourdough starter becomes sort of a metaphor for SF and its multiculturalism. The story is augmented by texted updates from the Mazg brothers from London. While not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, it is pleasantly amusing, akin to a fairy tale at times, with the story moving along at a breezy clip.

Tasty!

Recommended.

UPDTE: The audiobook version has additional material, including machine-generated ‘Mazg’ music!

By Professor Batty


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Click on Month in sidebar for older (or newer) posts ~ All original content © Stephen Charles Cowdery, 2004-2025