3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
TechCrunch calls True Blue "a parable to our own world, infested with the kind of speculative details that Peper is known for." Folks like Robin Sloan, David Brin, Seth Godin, Berit Anderson, and Ev Williams said nice things about it that made me blush. David Cohen and Brad Feld wrote blog posts about it here and here.
What if your future was determined by the color of your eyes? If you haven't yet, experience True Blue right here. Then learn how we made it.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Fox 8 by George Saunders is a profound, whimsical story about a curious young fox who manages to learn human speech. His journey reveals humanity's best and worst qualities, illuminating our relationship with our fellow travelers in this little biosphere we call home. We can learn at least as much from Fox 8 as he learns from us.
Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs is a gorgeous, revelatory memoir about a girl coming of age whose father just happens to be Steve Jobs. Brennan-Jobs has a keen eye for the pain, joy, and strange beauty of life and renders it in prose at once delicate and powerful. There is so much truth packed into each page.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson is a long, dense, speculative novel following a group of contemplatives in an intellectual monastic subculture on a world similar to our own. What starts out as a coming of age tale morphs into a story of first-contact with outside civilizations that subvert expectations.
Bonus recommendation: I interviewed Eva Hagberg Fisher for the Chicago Review of Books about writing, life, and her brilliant debut memoir How To Be Loved. The conversation digs deep on craft.
In other news, ZDNet ran a lovely, profound, generous review of the Analog Series that is thought-provoking in its own right, "Like the best futurist fiction, Peper's Analog trilogy leaves you both satisfied and unsatisfied, content with a story that ends well, but asking questions about how we can go from our current informational wild west to something democratic, something we all have a say in, that's for all of us and not solely built to generate shareholder value. These are big questions, and it's good that the final pages of Breach leave us asking them. After all, if we don't know what questions to ask, how can we build a better world?" Seriously, read the review in its entirety. It stayed with me long after reaching the end. A few weeks back, I had a blast in Austin at SXSW where I joined Kevin Bankston, Malka Older, and Tim Fernholz for a panel discussion on the feedback loop between science fiction and real world tech. This interview leading up to the event gives you a taste of the conversation. Separately, I published a blog post about the growth corkscrew. Finally, I just hit 42k words on the rough draft of a new novel.
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 earned praise from 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's tomorrow is familiar yet utterly changed."
-ZDNet on Bandwidth
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