

The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. She must keep it alive, they tell her-feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. 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. Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions.

In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr.
