3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
I’m excited to share that I'm joining Scout as an editor and special adviser. Scout is a fantastic new publication that combines original speculative fiction and in-depth technology journalism to explore the social implications of innovation. I backed them on Kickstarter way back when and quickly befriended the founders, Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath. It’s been amazing to watch them grow and publish groundbreaking stories that have changed the way I see the world.
In addition to advising them on strategy, I’ll be contributing original fiction to Scout and launching a series called Incoming Transmission that explores the big ideas living inside important books that illuminate the present by examining the future.
As subscribers to this humble little newsletter, you already have an inside view of exactly what we're hoping to achieve. In fact, the very first Incoming Transmission is an exclusive interview with Malka Older, author of the amazing debut political science fiction thriller Infomocracy which I recommended here a few months ago. If you check out Incoming Transmission, I’d love to hear what you think.
Oh, and by the way, becoming a Scout member is still invite-only. If it piques your fancy, let me know and I’ll hook you up.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is a wildly imaginative novel that blends psychological thriller elements with quantum physics to create a non-stop rollercoaster that you'll never want to get off of. The story sucked me in after the first paragraph and only gained momentum along the way. In addition to being a compelling tale with great characters, it's a thought-experiment in paths not taken.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is packed with invaluable pieces of wisdom for anyone making anything. Whether you're an artist, entrepreneur, writer, or dreamer, Pressfield will immediately sway you with his all-too-true observations about the creative process, thoughtful perspective, and actionable advice for getting to the heart of what you do best. I found myself marking page after page to come back and reread.
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu is an accessible and provocative history of the attention industry from yellow journalism, to World War I propaganda, to MTV, to Facebook. These dynamics are especially important not just because they shape public discourse, but also because they form the business model underlying so much of the internet. Between powerful theses and data-driven conclusions, Wu weaves in factoids and anecdotes sure to ignite your curiosity.
Bonus recommendation: Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu) is a poignant novelette that imagines a future Beijing in which the ultra wealthy and the struggling masses are segregated sociologically and architecturally. Hao's day job is macroeconomic research and her story deserves its Hugo Award.
In other news, I just passed 60k words in the rough draft of my next novel, The Feed, which explores the role algorithms play in mediating our digital lives and the geopolitics of climate change. I'm super excited about how the story is coming together and can't wait to get it into you hands. I gave a talk at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco about using storytelling to fight oppression. Next month, I'll be speaking on a variety of panels at CU Boulder's Conference on World Affairs, which is particularly cool because the protagonists of the Uncommon Series, Mara and James, were CU Boulder dropouts! If you're interested in the origin story behind the Uncommon Series, Michael Sacca interviewed me about how I wrote the trilogy over the course of two years. Crazy that it's now the #1 top-rated financial thriller on Amazon, all thanks to you!
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, forward this email to a friend. I love sharing amazing stories that explore the intersection of technology and culture. The goal of this newsletter is to recommend books, both fiction and nonfiction, that crackle and fizz with big ideas, keep us turning pages deep into the night, challenge our assumptions, help us find meaning in a changing world, and make us think, feel, and ask hard questions. In an age of digital abundance, quality is the new scarcity. The right book at the right time can change your life.
I also pull back the curtain on my creative process. When I'm not reading books, I'm writing them. If you're interested, you can find my books right here. They've been praised by Businessweek, Popular Science, TechCrunch, io9, and Ars Technica. I'd love to hear what you think if you give them a read.
Cheers, Eliot
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