+ My new novel, Breach, launches today +
Usually I send an email recommending books I love, but this is a special edition. My new novel, Breach, comes out today and if you enjoy this newsletter, you're going to love it. I poured my heart and soul into this book and can't wait to hear what you think.
What if a giant tech company became sovereign and democratic? In Breach, hackers and spies grapple over the future of governance. Dark, lush, and philosophical, Breach is a globe-trotting, near-future thriller brimming with intrigue and big ideas. If you're curious about how technology is changing our lives and world, you're in for a wild ride.
Pick up your copy of Breach right here.
Breach and the Analog novels have earned praise from publications like the New York Times Book Review, TechCrunch, and Ars Technica, and people like Malka Older, Cory Doctorow, and Craig Newmark. Seth Godin says, "The Analog series from Eliot Peper is simply terrific science fiction from the (very) near future–I loved all three."
Each Analog novel can be read independently, and enriches the others. ZDNet ran a thoughtful, comprehensive review of the trilogy if you want some context. Where Bandwidth extrapolates how feeds shape the geopolitics of climate change and Borderless examines how software is subverting nation-states, Breach explores what might come next—how we need to reinvent ourselves and our institutions to build a better future.
Although Breach is the third and final Analog novel, the protagonist, Emily Kim, was the first character who revealed herself to me when I began work on the series.
I was hiking through Wildcat Canyon Regional Park with my wife and our conversation teased at the edges of an amorphous story idea. I never know what particular seed will grow into a book and we talked about the invisible forces shaping world events, odd details we noticed in our lives, and speculative questions about how things might be different. It was from this strange cocktail that Emily emerged.
A teenager forced to fend for herself who develops a keen eye for the hidden rules that influence behavior, subverting them to survive and serve the powerless. A rebel with an anachronistic sense of honor who cannot blind herself to the failures of a broken system. A fighter who loves her friends as fiercely as she hates any sign of weakness in herself, who harbors the vain hope that her ruthless pursuit of perfection might help to balance out the injustice of an imperfect world.
Emily is as hard and brilliant as a polished diamond. I couldn’t write her right away. I wasn’t ready for her.
And so I did what Emily would do: I looked at the world around me, and squinted a little bit.
Technology is diverting the structure and flow of power. Computers and capital have stitched together a fractured world into a single variegated civilization, even as reactionary forces desperately try to turn back the clock. The companies that built the internet are forging global empires that Alexander the Great would never have been able to imagine. What were once scrappy startups have become geopolitical players on par with nation-states.
But with scale comes responsibility, a responsibility that digital luminaries have yet to come to terms with. The miraculous tools they’ve developed won them the reins of history, but those same reins curse them with exactly what many technologists have spent their lives trying to avoid: politics.
Technology has endowed us with superpowers, but who gets to decide what to do with them? This is the reckoning that Breach grapples with. This is the crucible that only someone like Emily could face. Someone as hard and brilliant as a diamond, whose facets transform the harsh light of suffering into coruscating rainbows, who learns that being broken is just the beginning.
If we are to avoid a future of disenfranchisement, we must invent new ways to grant as many people as possible as much agency as possible over their lives. We must take the power we’ve earned, and share it. In doing so, we might just find that ceding control can be more liberating than seizing it, that perfection is a mirage, that civilization is a work in progress, that the universe demands nothing more than we choose to give.
I chose to give Emily everything I have, and I hope that her journey will give you a small seed to carry with you that might one day grow into a story of its own.
Writers write, but books take flight only when readers tell other readers about them. If Breach means something to you, please tell your friends about it. Culture is a strange and beautiful garden nourished by word of mouth.
Here are three things you can do to help:
Buy a copy right now. Early sales make a tremendous impact on a book's success. They catapult it up the bestseller rankings, contribute to it getting featured as a hot new release, and attract attention from press and booksellers. This matters. The ebook will appear instantly on your Kindle, the audiobook narration is A++, and the hardcover has some gorgeous design touches.
Leave a review ASAP. Early positive reviews give books a critical boost in Amazon's algorithms, exposing it to new readers who depend on your good judgement. It only takes a few minutes and makes a huge difference.
Share it with your friends. We discover our next favorite story thanks to someone we trust recommending it to us. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. Whisper about it in the shadows and shout about it from the rooftops. Publish a blog post, post it on Reddit, review it on Goodreads, RT it on Twitter, and jump into the comments on Facebook. Gift it to folks who might love it.
Thank you for being the best readers any writer could hope for. You are the people who inspire me to push through when I feel like quitting. You are the people who bring these stories to life. You are the people I write for.
Cheers, Eliot
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Eliot Peper is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. Subscribe to his blog here.
“Rising science fiction star Eliot Peper takes us into a near future where everyone, every nation, and everything depends on the feed—an extension of the dominant social media companies that dominate the news today. Compelling action is mixed with thoughtful treatises on the power of information and who should control it, and on the nature of human relationships.”
-Glen Hiemstra, founder of Futurist.com, on Borderless
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