Nirvana, Gilbert and Sullivan,
and Into Alignment

I wanted the coast in Into Alignment to feel like Washington or Oregon, where a trip to the beach never quite relaxes me. I grew up visiting Nags Head and Cape Cod, and I don’t remember tsunami evacuation signs being part of those vacations. On the Pacific Northwest coast, those signs change the experience. I can be enjoying the ocean and still be thinking about how quickly I could get uphill.

That may mostly be my own worrying, but knowing about the Cascadia subduction zone gives the place an edge I can’t ignore. I wanted that unease around the company in the novel: the office is friendly, the work continues, and everyone is supposed to be moving forward together, even as they wait for a change they don’t understand.

Nirvana came into the book through the drive to that coast. When I go through Aberdeen, I always notice the “Come As You Are” sign and think about Kurt Cobain. The town’s welcome is also a reminder of the music that came out of it, which makes it hard for me to separate the songs from the place.

Nirvana felt like a Beatles moment to me, with a new sound suddenly changing what people wanted to hear. It happened during enormous upheaval: the Soviet Union was collapsing, globalization was accelerating, and Washington’s timber communities were already struggling with mill closures and changes in forestry. International competition and automation had helped undermine jobs that towns like Aberdeen depended on.

I hear some of that uncertainty in Nirvana’s music, and it’s part of why I used it in a book about AI. Generative AI brings a familiar anxiety about work and about whether the future has room for you. I’m not assuming it will end badly, but I recognize the angst of watching an economy change before anyone can tell you where you’ll fit.

I’m probably too old to identify the musical response to this moment. Having a sixteen-year-old doesn’t make me an authority on what’s happening culturally, either. In the novel, though, Nirvana is already there: the office’s morning greeting comes from “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Come As You Are” has become another phrase the colleagues pass around without asking where it came from.

Gilbert and Sullivan surprised me more

I was in a Gilbert and Sullivan production as a kid, and I think I may have sung the Major-General’s song. I’m not much of a fan now; the tightly ordered patter can sound almost like computer music to me. When I happened to listen again and paid attention to the words, though, I heard something oddly familiar.

In The Pirates of Penzance, which premiered in 1879, the Major-General introduces himself as “the very model” and lists everything he knows. He can move from history to mathematics to art, producing facts across subjects with impressive fluency. The joke is that this enormous store of knowledge doesn’t equip him to do his actual job.

He also admits that his military knowledge has a limit:

For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century.

That sounds remarkably like a knowledge cutoff. The resemblance is funny because it goes beyond the word “model”: he knows a great deal, can recite it beautifully, and has serious gaps in the knowledge he needs. Gilbert was satirizing a military officer, of course, not predicting a language model. I just find the comparison hard to resist.

It seemed appropriate for the agents in Into Alignment to adopt that song. They enjoy its precision and trade lines between tickets, while the reader gets to hear a joke they don’t fully recognize about themselves. That was enough reason to put it in the book, without making anyone stop the conversation to explain it.

The novel follows Walt and his eleven-person customer-support pod as their affection for the office runs into questions about what the company expects of them. If you’d like to meet them, read Into Alignment. There’s also a playlist, presented as eleven songs recovered from the office’s shared folder. Giving the agents a soundtrack started as a joke, but these two influences belong there.