3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
Big news: I just signed a three book deal with Amazon Publishing and my new novel, Bandwidth, will come out May 2018. ๐ฎ ๐ ๐
Bandwidth is a near future thriller that explores the geopolitics of climate change and how algorithms shape our lives. Imagine Mr. Robot meets House of Cards, with techno utopian activists hacking the global feed to influence the psychology of world leaders.
I'm super excited to work with with Adrienne Procaccini, Colleen Lindsay, and the whole Amazon Publishing team to bring the story to life. Speaking of teams, I'm also extremely happy to be partnering with DongWon Song at Howard Morhaim for literary representation. He's a (possibly evil) genius.
(Hot tip: If you come across a possibly evil genius, recruit them.)
To pay it forward, I'm donating 15% of the Bandwidth advance to support Michelle Welsch's incredible work improving education in Nepal. Whether or not our science fiction stories imagine better worlds, we can all do our part to help build one.
For longtime subscribers, Bandwidth is the story that had the working title *The Feed*. I can't wait to get it into your hands.
More details to come. For now, Iโm off to start working on book two...
And now, books I love that you might too:
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is a rollicking adventure through a future of technological abundance and economic inequality where eccentric billionaires invest in radical life extension and hackers advance toward uploading human minds. People struggling to survive on the fringes of a broken system set out to construct a new society from scratch and struggle with the social implications of technological change every step of the way. Doctorow navigates a truly zany number of big, important, challenging ideas with apparent ease and it was a delight to interview him for Scout's Incoming Transmission. Read the interview here (seriously, it's A++).
A Perfect Spy by John le Carrรฉ is a sophisticated, literary espionage thriller about a British spy wrestling with conflicting loyalties during the height of the Cold War. This was my first experience with le Carrรฉ's novels and although it started slower than I expected, the story accelerated in a masterful series of twists that revealed as much about human nature as clandestine operations. Le Carrรฉ has a compassionate but clear-eyed perspective on how we become who we are and what makes us tick.
Behave by Robert Sapolsky has an ambitious mandate: using biology to explain the best and worst of human behavior. Pulling from a startlingly wide array of scientific disciplines, Sapolsky delves into genetics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, molecular and evolutionary biology and many other fields in order to explain why we do what we do. This is a challenging book with extensive acronyms and citations, but the rigor of Sapolsky's analysis yields worthy, deep, and surprising insights into everything from criminal justice to compassion, inequality, adultery, war, redemption, and our most intimate inner lives.
Bonus recommendation: Jesus Christ is Not in Your Contacts by Laura Drake is a clever short story that provides a fresh and provocative perspective on our complicated relationship with technology.
In other news, Burning Man is approaching fast and Amazon is running a special limited sale on Neon Fever Dream to celebrate. You can snag the Kindle version today for just $.99. Perfect for gearing up for the playa or, if you've never been, trying to make sense of all the weird stories you've heard about the event. The first ten episodes of Bound's adaptation of Cumulus are now available, complete with art and extras. The app is available for free in the iOS App Store and you can download it and start reading right here. Ramez Naam, award-winning author of Nexus, just said some really nice things about Cumulus, "All too real. A thriller of the very near future, at the intersection of surveillance and inequality. Read it now, before it happens!" Hearing that from one of my favorite writers gave me a special warm and fuzzy feeling (also, read his books, they're awesome!). Finally, I'm working on a secret project with David Cohen, Peter Nowell, and James Zhang. Can't say much about it yet, but it has to do with True Blue...
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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