3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
There is no better gift than a good book. Books contain the distilled wisdom of humanity's greatest thinkers. Books challenge us to expand our horizons and reevaluate our most deeply held assumptions. Books invite us to explore distant galaxies, face our fears, find meaning in our lives, unlock our imaginations, and slip inside someone else's skin.
When you give someone a book, you're offering them an entire world.
If you know someone with insatiable curiosity and a keen sense of adventure, give them a copy of Borderless. John Hanke, CEO at Niantic and creator of Google Maps, describes it as “William Gibson meets Daniel Suarez. Launching the reader into a world dominated by massive tech companies and struggling nation states, Borderless explores frighteningly plausible scenarios that extrapolate the social implications of privacy, data, and national sovereignty. Diana, a refugee-turned-secret-agent, barrels through Bay Area hipster hangouts and the inner sanctums of geopolitical power on her way to shaping a future that feels like it’s right around the corner. Borderless is fresh, intriguing, and inevitable.”
And now, books I love that you might too:
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is an extraordinary novel that follows six different characters through an intricate web of interconnected stories spanning three centuries. This book is a feat of pure M.C. Escher-esque imagination, featuring a structure as creative and compelling as its content. Mitchell takes the reader on a journey ranging from the 19th century South Pacific to a far-future Korean corpocracy and challenges us to rethink the very idea of civilization along the way. This book reminded me why I love to read (and write).
AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee is a thought-provoking overview of the burgeoning feedback loop between machine learning and geopolitics. As AI becomes more and more powerful, it becomes an instrument of power, and this book outlines what that means for China, the US, and the hidden forces shaping this new century. Lee himself is a machine learning pioneer, former President of Google China, and currently a leading venture capital investor in Beijing. The future he extrapolates sheds fresh light on the present.
This Is Marketing by Seth Godin is a principled, actionable field guide for anyone looking to share their creative work. Godin strips away all the self-serving bullshit that taints so much marketing advice and cuts to the heart of what it means to do work you're proud of for people you care about. As a novelist, reading this book challenged me to examine what about my own work resonates most deeply with readers, and how I can better serve them.
Bonus recommendation: I went on Mary Kay Magistad's Whose Century Is It? podcast to discuss Bandwidth, Borderless, the social role of science fiction, and how I imagine possible futures.
In other news, I went on the Lisa Valentine Clark Show to talk about how creativity is a form of leadership. Factor Daily highlighted Bandwidth in this feature about how science fiction wrestles with climate change. Vicky A. Simon and Daniel Hietmann reviewed Borderless here and here. I wrote blog posts about why most successful people have no idea what made them successful and how to build a consulting practice. Andrew Liptak recommended Cumulus in his excellent science fiction newsletter. And in my latest column for Medium, I talk to critically acclaimed novelist and political scientist Malka Older about the hidden forces shaping the future of democracy.
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, tell your friends. 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 the New York Times Book Review, Businessweek, Popular Science, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, io9, and Ars Technica. I'd love to hear what you think if you give them a read.
Cheers, Eliot
“Peper does a fabulous job depicting power and its trappings and giving a sense of super-powerful, super-competent sociopaths… It’s a fine science fiction novel that grapples with power, consent, manipulation, equity, duty, and friendship, where no one is entirely irredeemable and even the heroes need redemption.”
-Cory Doctorow on Bandwidth
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