Prince of Foxes
If you're looking for a beach read this summer, may I not-so-humbly recommend Foundry, my spy thriller exploring the power and consequences of the absolutely fascinating semiconductor supply chains required to produce the device you're using to read this sentence.
Foundry came out last October and the response has been weirdly binary: I've never received more positive substantive feedback from individual readers—so many in-depth, moving emails—and yet sales have been surprisingly modest, there are fewer copies out there than any of my other recent novels.
It’s a very particular story written for a very particular audience—you!—so while I don’t expect Foundry to become a breakout mainstream success, I do think there are still lots of people out there who would absolutely love it if only they knew it existed.
The themes are as timely as ever, so I'm hoping to give it another bump and would love your help. If you enjoy Foundry, can you tell your friends about it and leave an Amazon review? That may sound insignificant, but I can’t emphasize enough how much of a difference it makes. Books thrive on word-of-mouth.
And now, a book I love that you might too:
Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger is a swashbuckling adventure about a young man seeking his fortune in the warring city-states of Renaissance Italy. You might expect a story like this to show a loss of innocence, the hero becoming more cynical as he enters a maze of intrigue and betrayal, but, refreshingly, this protagonist starts out steeped in a Machiavellian worldview, but grows to recognize the cold vacuum at the heart of the pursuit of power, and how life contains so many more important and beautiful things to focus on. This is an unusually well-balanced novel that weaves action, character, misdirection, growth, and psychological insight into a compelling, immersive story.
Things worth sharing:
I am straight-up delighted to see Foundry at the top of Seth Godin’s summer reading recommendations. There’s nothing quite like seeing something you made resonate with someone you admire.
If you’re interested in the art of storytelling, I highly recommend the Scriptnotes podcast where John August and Craig Mazin discuss the nuts and bolts of writing screenplays. Hearing two expert practitioners talk through specific aspects of craft is useful in a way that bio-focused podcast interviews rarely achieve. Their conversations always remind me of Josh Anon’s notes on early drafts of my novels.
When I’m not writing, I’m surfing. I used to watch full-length surf films and read surfing magazines, but it turns out that I far prefer a format enabled by the rise of Instagram: short clips of pros riding individual waves. Surfing revolves around catching and riding one wave at a time and then paddling out and waiting for the next one, so this new format better reflects the natural rhythm of the sport.
Emmett Shear: “The invention of spectacles for reading (triggered by the rise of printed type) led pretty directly to the microscope and telescope, and thereby the entire modern scientific revolution. Rarely remarked on but pivotal — the first time we crafted glass to shape light.”
ICYMI, I interviewed Robin Sloan about AI, fantasy maps, and writing Moonbound.
It’s striking how a new class of popular entertainer/public intellectual has emerged who specialize in translating third-party cultural goods—books, movies, articles, commencement speeches, music, scientific papers, etc.—into snippets designed to please specific social media algorithms, thereby amassing enormous followings. I’m an enthusiastic follower of many accounts like this and have discovered lots of amazing stuff through them that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise—they seem to be serving a cultural curation function that was previously occupied mostly by professional critics.
When you use experience as a guide, remember that your guide is unfamiliar with 99%+ of reality. As Haruki Murakami writes, “What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”
The more fun you have doing something, the more you’ll do it, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it, so the best way to get good at something is to figure out how to have the most fun.
This wonderful essay by Haley Stewart brought to mind one of my favorite Neil Gaiman lines: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
My favorite biographer is Stefan Zweig because instead of seeking to cover as much of his subject's life as possible, he cuts everything except that which is necessary to understand why their particular life matters and what you can learn from it. Try Magellan or Montaigne.
It was fun to open the Liberty newsletter and see this quote from Veil: “Clarity is forging your imagination into a pebble that, when tossed, will ripple through other minds.”
I interviewed Kim Stanley Robinson a few years back and this idea has been living rent free in my head ever since: “We live in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together. Because of that, science fiction is the realism of our time. It’s become the most relevant and dominant art form in our culture.”
Thanks for reading. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. So when you fall in love with a story, tell your friends. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.
Best, Eliot
Eliot Peper is the author of Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He also consults on special projects.
“This book will devour your free time. It will ruin your sleep. It will infiltrate your mind. It will steal your heart. Buy it. Read it. You can thank me later.”
-David Cohen, founder at Techstars on Foundry