Art of Google II (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore)

Now the tables have turned.  The novel -- Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan -- is definitely written by somebody who has drunk the Google Kool-Aid (far more than myself) and who probably did have some inside access at Google.  Google employees are represented in very positive, nearly glowing terms, although some of them do ultimately come off as obsessed -- and a very few come with that light taint of self-righteousness.  While it is not immediately apparent from the first few pages, Google and the spirit of Google is deeply entrenched in this novel; if you are a Google-hater, you will almost certainly want to pass this book by.

There will be plenty of MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD, so you have been warned.

I'd heard a bit of the buzz about this book when it suddenly appeared at the Burnaby Library in this area where they keep newish books, and I decided to check it out (a year or so ahead of when I was expecting to get to it).  It turned out to be a fun and quite compelling book. I read it in a day and a half. I think a good analogy is if the "DaVinci's Code" was tackled by a group of programmers from Google. Certainly there were considerable implausibilities (and indeed the final reveal at the end is absurd, which I'll get to in a bit), but still entertaining.

The book is set in San Francisco.  The main character, Clay, studied art history and typography. He is slowly teaching himself coding by setting up simple websites for a bagel shop where he was employed.  This store goes under (perhaps in the wake of the crash of 2008), so he is starting to feel the pinch.  He wanders into this incredible book store -- Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour bookstore -- which is filled with towering shelves of books with very odd titles (that turn out to be in incomprehensible code).  He impresses Mr. Penumbra and gets the job as the night clerk at the bookstore.  I'll turn to the issue of the code later after the second spoiler warning.

One of the more interesting yet somewhat overplayed ideas was that Clay, while a bright guy, is basically useful because he has all these connections to people with really specialized skills and he knows how to deploy them in the right situations.  His best friend (from middle school), Neel, is a wealthy web-entrepreneur with some programming skills though he employs a number of 1st rate programmers, who come in handy later.  His special-effects guru room-mate (employed at ILM no less) basically builds him a replica of one of the store logbooks so he can take the original off to be scanned by Google.

And why does Clay have an in with Google?  He placed the perfect ad on social media (or perhaps Google itself), which brings in Kat, a young woman who actually works for Google and is very intelligent but really intense.  She spends a lot of her time thinking of ways to freeze her brain to achieve immortality.  (Given that I wondered in high school if one's memory (and perhaps personality) could be stored on computer, I can relate.  It's a fairly common trope in science fiction.)

Well, it turns out that there is a reason behind this madness, and Mr. Penumbra is secretly urging Clay on, while all the time officially telling him he needs to keep his nose out of this.  A fairly substantial number of quest stories have this figure who feel the best way to motivate the hero is by discouraging them.  The ones who persist are heroes.

While ultimately, Clay's cleverness seems too good to be true, I've actually experienced a bit of the power of connectedness myself.  In my field, I stay in touch with a large number of professors and consultants.  There have been two times in the past month where I was asked about filling a specific task/role on a project (or rather a bid on a project), and I was able to rope in a distinguished professor with the right qualifications.  So there are people whose primary role is to be a connector/facilitator, which is basically how Clay is portrayed.

Ok, at this point, the review goes into

MAJOR SPOILER MODE

(Seriously, if you haven't read the book and don't want the ending revealed,
DO NOT KEEP READING DUE TO SPOILERS)

It turns out that there are many levels of secrets in this book.  The first layer is that when one works through all the books on the shelves in the correct order then they form a connect-the-dots picture of the Founder.  (While it didn't quite bother me at the time, they do on rare occasions add new books to the library, so I don't know if they just fill in the outline around the edges or what.)

There is a certain implausibility to this, since you would need many, many points to make a legible image.  Given the description in the book of an old man with glasses, it might look something like this:

This is a 1000 dot connect the dot picture by Thomas Pavitte (visit his site here).  I think you would need at least 300 dots to get the complexity described in the book and probably more like 600 or 700.  While the very best code-breakers could probably go through a book a week, most seem to take a month or more.  We are looking at 10 year investment at a minimum to progress to the next level.  It is also totally unclear how they stick in the clue to go to the next book (for those people that are still writing the new ones), since it would seem to be a non-organic part of the book.  (The books themselves are basically autobiographies of the people that make it to the next level.)  But the clue to move on to the next book would not be an organic part of the book.  Given that these folks are master code-breakers, it definitely seems they would figure out how to jump to the end.  A totally different thought occurs to me and that is that a huge number of books have to be left unread or there won't be any "white space" to make the picture work.  Maybe any book written in the last 400 years is just shelved in the white spaces, and thus no one is encouraged (or perhaps even allowed) to read the work, except the higher orders.  Kind of a depressing thought.  Frankly, I'm not sure Robin Sloan really worked through all the implications here.

Ok, so it turns out that with the help of Google, Clay is able to make the image appear in a matter of minutes by tracing the sequence of books checked out by the others (building off of their labor basically -- how typically Google).

While Mr. Penumbra is momentarily discouraged, he eventually decides that computer power has increased to the point it can be used to crack the Founder's book, which is encoded so well, that no one has broken it in 500 or so years.  We also learn that in the higher orders of this cult Mr. Penumbra is a bit of a maverick.  Even though the cult's funding comes from licensing fonts to corporations (hard to believe this would generate the millions required to keep these bookstores going, but a minor point not worth quibbling over), they are generally anti-technology.  And why is this effort worth it for all these acolytes and masters?  The Founder apparently achieved immortality and vanished in a poof of smoke among the books he had printed (or something like that).

So the plot really kicks into high gear.  Mr. Penumbra gets them into the cult headquarters (semi-legitimately).  Then Clay breaks back in and photographs the secret tome (and Mr. Penumbra's autobiography for good measure).  They take this to Google, which throws the entire Google cloud at it for a minute or so.  And they fail to break the code.

Now, this is where I think the book goes off the rails.  Sloan is just trying to be so super-clever, showing how one insightful guy (armed with the knowledge of typeface design) can succeed where all the computing power in the world fails.  He's John Friggin' Henry of the computer era.  And it's absurd.

While everyone else is off licking their wounds from this misadventure (and not surprisingly this set-back causes Kat to break up with Clay), Clay manages to find the missing metal parts (punches) that were used to generate the font that underlies this whole venture.  And it turns out that there is a clever substitution code embedded in the characters themselves (if you blow them up by a factor of 10 or so).  But Sloan spoils it by saying that you can even see this if you blow up the computer font!  Seriously?  If that were true, then the substitution doesn't vary by letter.  And this would be a trivial substitution code exercise that the cult would have broken within a year.  Or even if he meant that you could just see the notch in the font (but that they only chose one of a half-dozen different variants with the notch in different places), there were simply not enough pixels for this to be done.

But let's ignore that part.  There are basically a few possibilities.  The Founder either passed on a set of punches (which would mean that each letter only had one notch -- so a simple substitution) or an entire case of type (where the notches moved around a bit on the different letters), though that doesn't sound like what Clay picked up from the storage center. It's very hard to believe that whatever he left was maintained in working order for 500 years, and it basically means that all the secret tomes were misprinted, since they surely weren't set exactly as the Founder set them.  If anyone was let on to the importance of making sure all the imperfections of the font was maintained and that new editions of the secret tome had to be printed absolutely identically to the first one, then the jig would be up.  So somebody would have actually known what was going on.  I think there are just too many implausibilities to take this solution very seriously.  And I still think there would have been enough recurring patterns, even if it was sort of a semi-random substitution code, that Google's computing power would have been able to eventually crack this.

Ultimately, I thought the solution to the riddle too clever by half, but it still was a very entertaining book.  I loved the bit where Clay and Neel say it was all worth it just to enter a secret room under Manhattan.  It is basically a lot of nerd wish-fulfillment (or nerd-service) where the smart kids are cool and the smartest of them all turns out to be smarter than anyone at Google and maybe the whole Internet itself!*  I wouldn't at all be surprised to see it turned into a movie someday.  Now whether I would go is a different story.



* And what is this review other than a long-winded way of saying I am have caught Robin Sloan out (and must be a bit smarter).  Well, he's the smart one for doing something more tangibly creative.  Oh, Internet, what have you turned me into?

To bring this back around to Google one last time, it is definitely worth checking out Randall Monroe's efforts to determine how many punchcards it would take to store all of Google's data (see the original page and the subsequent TED talk).