Sourdough: A Novel

259 pages

English language

Published Nov. 2, 2017 by MCD.

ISBN:
9780374203108
Goodreads:
33916024

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4 stars (3 reviews)

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.

Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens …

1 edition

A happy romp through a weird and wonderful high-tech food-science future, with a sprinkling of magic realism

3 stars

As I've become a sourdough enthusiast myself, I found the existence of this book intriguing; a story about a woman robotics worker living in Silicon Valley, who starts experimenting with sourdough, obtains a 'mother' from an exotic ex-boyfriend, becomes involved with privately-funded underground project based in an abandoned military base, where various 'mad scientist' types research their bleeding-edge food technology, working towards the opening day of the ultimate exotic food market - sourdough, but also crickets, slurry grown from fungus, etc.

I enjoyed it, but on reflection, the fact that the plot could be encapsulated as "woman programmer discovers that actually she prefers baking" left a sour taste. And that was before I discovered that the author, Robin Sloan, isn't a woman as I had assumed.

Review of 'Sourdough: A Novel' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Someday someone will dig through the carbon nanotube graveyard of Silicon Valley and wonder, was there ever any humanity here? And someone else will hand them this book, gray and dusty from age, and say, "Yes. Many of the people here felt the yearning of creating something by hand, for no other reason than the pleasure of mastering a craft, and sharing it with their friends. Those people all left, and the ones that remained turned into robots, and died." The first person nods solemnly. It is a shame. Had more people read this book, perhaps this land might have been saved.