"How was New York?' Ashley asks politely. I'm not sure how to respond. Something like: <i>Well, the mustachioed master of the secret library is going… - Robin Sloan

"They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China; for Google, it’s Facebook...But here’s the difference: staring down the inevitable, American pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

"But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand."
"So we're down to five days instead of five years."
"Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what — we have ten thousand friends. It's called" — she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen — "Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."
She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable.