Sourdough

Robin Sloan has created a novel that is about baking bread, physics, computer robotics all mixed up in a bowl that keeps the reader trying to figure out what the message of the story is.

Lois Clary is a software programmer, who lives in San Francisco and codes all day and collapses at night from her new job.  She has no social life and very little human interaction.  She does not know how to cook for herself and is subsisting on Slurry, a whole processed nutrition drink.  Lois explains to the reader early on, "Let me just establish where I was at with the whole cooking situation.  When I was a child my family had no distinguishable cuisine.  ...We possessed no stock of recipes, no traditions, no ancestral affinities.  There was a lot of migration and drama in our history; our line had been broken not once but many times, like one of those gruesome accident reports, the bone shattered in six places.  When they put my family back together, they left out the food."

One day a menu randomly placed on her doorstep leads her to start ordering from Clement Street Soup and Sourdough.  A spicy soup and sourdough bread that is delivered on a regular basis starts to make Lois feel better than she has in months.  When the brothers who run the food service leave the country due to Visa issues, they leave Lois with the sourdough bread starter.  She must keep it alive.  This is a task that starts to become an obsession with Lois.  She is now baking bread and coding around the clock.  She is challenged to combine her two expert interests; coding a robotic arm to learn to bake. 

This is where this reader kept looking for the message.  I was assuming that the lesson I would learn in the end was that human interaction is the most important.  That letting robots take over jobs that people do is wrong and will turn out badly in the end. That there is no replacement for the loving touch of human hands on our food.  Throughout the book there are ups and downs of the ability of the robotic arm to be useful in the kitchen, but I am not sure Sloan leaves us with the don't do it message.  Also there is the continued search for a nutritional supplement that you can eat that gives you all your nutrition without eating food.  Is man sustainable without his human diet?  That was also a theme throughout the book that explored and hopefully shown to be unsustainable.

An interesting plot line idea that bubbles in a crock like sourdough starter, but collapses when baked and taken out of the oven in the end.