Are you getting these all from their iPod?

No, I think it's in a cloud.

Oh.

What the hell is an Orson Willie in future?

I'm Greta Johnson.

I'm Tricia Bobita.

And this is the Nerdette podcast.

Apologies for my slightly Muppity voice. I have a touch of the plague. But I'm here, nerds. I'm here. You sound more sick to me than Muppity, but I really enjoy the image of Tricia as Muppet, so I'm going with it. Yeah. It was much more Muppity over the last few days. There was a lot of like, oh, oh, that's adorable. Like you were an

adolescent male all of a sudden. Yeah, sort of. That time in our lives that we always wished we had.

Mm-hmm. All right. So today's show, it's going to be a really good one. We've got Robin Sloan. He's the

author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore. And a prequel is also out. It's called Ajax

Penumbra, 1969, and it's a little more of the world of these characters for us. If you are a fan

of the book already, make sure you check out that prequel. Yeah, I mean, really all you need to know,

the title should be enough. It's about a 24-hour bookstore. There pretty much would be nothing

cooler on earth, right? You'll also hear Nerdat contributor Lauren Chulgin in this conversation,

which we thought was only fair since she introduced Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore to us earlier

this year. Lauren read Robin Sloan's book as part of a book club. And she weasles in some of their questions, too.

I think especially these days, when a lot of people buy books digitally, the paperback

release becomes a little more interesting because suddenly on the print side of the house,

you know, you have a reason for people to be interested again. You kind of get that, you know, another path through those front tables at the bookstores. But on the digital side, it's just the same old book as it was a year ago. So we actually decided to put something together to kind of get people interested in the digital side again. So I actually wrote a whole new story. It's a short story, and it's a prequel. It's

sort of events leading up to the story in Mr. Penumbras 24-hour bookstore. And yeah, it's

primarily available as a digital short, you know, everywhere you would buy that sort of thing,

...