3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
I was nervous and excited for my new novel to come out last month, and the response has been overwhelming in the best possible way. Folks like Malka Older, Ev Williams, Craig Newmark, and Seth Godin are saying very kind things about it, Amazon's editorial team selected it as a Best Book of the Month, Medium invited me to contribute an essay on imagining new institutions for the internet age, and FactorDaily ran a wonderful review, saying, "We must turn to fiction like the Analog Novels to see what the future could look like, what it could hold in store for us, and what we can do to ensure it’s a good one. Read Eliot Peper’s Breach while it’s still fiction."
If you're in the mood for what David Brin calls "a globe-trotting, near-future thriller brimming with intrigue and big ideas," get yourself a copy of Breach.
And now, books I love that you might too:
The Moon by Oliver Morton is a masterpiece of science journalism that has forever changed the way I see its eponymous subject. Morton mines fields as diverse as aerospace, history, astrobiology, mythology, geology, and science fiction in pursuit of lessons the moon can teach us about space exploration, the universe, and ourselves. The idea-to-page ratio is stunning and the story synthesizes decades of rigorous and enthusiastic research and reporting. The Moon is more than a book, it is a mirror that reflects life in the Anthropocene.
Alien III by William Gibson is an original audio drama adapting Gibson's never-filmed screenplay that earned a cult following after being leaked online. A few years ago I was chatting with the showrunners of The Expanse series and they explained that sound is at least 50% of any movie or television experience. This audio drama proves their point—it's immersive, cinematic, and scary-as-hell. Keith Richards wrote about the-story-behind-the-story over on The Verge.
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse is a dense, philosophical novel about a man who rises to prominence in a secular monastic community of intellectuals only to realize the limitations of a life of the mind. The unusual structure of the book—part fictional biography written by a future historian, part collection of the protagonist's own writings—makes it a challenging read, but the payoff is worth it: deep insights into the meaning of personal growth in a changing world.
Bonus recommendation: Craig Mazin's new HBO miniseries, Chernobyl, is a riveting, deeply researched story about the 1986 disaster that examines the cost of lies and the implications of humans developing unprecedented technological power. Peter Sagal interviews Craig in this complementary podcast that explores the creative process behind the show episode-by-episode.
In other news:
I published a few blog posts: America at its best, Renovating the American Dream, How to overcome the post-launch blues, Fellow travelers make the best teachers, and What is a story?.
Danny Crichton interviewed me for TechCrunch about the lessons I learned writing Breach: "Stories are Trojan horses for ideas. The very fact that I can use that metaphor proves the point. The Iliad was written thousands of years ago, and yet we all understand that metaphor today, even if we've never read the story."
I went on the Future Fossils podcast to discuss what the future extrapolated in the Analog Novels can teach us about the present: “We are living in an age of acceleration—and yet, we have always been confronted by a universe that defies our limited ability to make sense of it.”
My wife and I just completed the five week, 824km Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route through northern Spain. I collected a few ideas that struck along the way in this thread.
I interviewed Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb and Cybercultural, about how to build a career as a professional creator: "Digital technology has profoundly changed the way cultural products are produced, distributed, paid for, and consumed."
Sean Wise interviewed me for Inc. about the feedback loop between speculative fiction and real world innovation: "To make sense of the world around us, to catch a glimpse of underlying reality, to notice those invisible forces, we must step outside ourselves. Reading is one way to do that."
Bandwidth just hit 800 reviews on Amazon! You are the best readers ever. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Word of mouth is everything.
ICYMI: I interviewed bestselling novelist Daniel Suarez about his biotech thriller, Change Agent, and the future according to CRISPR: "The big successes in synthetic biology will be created not by multi-billion dollar labs but by newcomers experimenting without preconceptions—in much the same way that early internet entrepreneurs disrupted existing gatekeepers. In the context of biology that's both exhilarating and terrifying."
Finally, I just handed in the rough draft of a new novel to my agent.
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
---
Eliot Peper is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. Subscribe to his blog here.
"Breach has all the markings of an Eliot Peper novel: It's thought-provoking, exciting, and eminently readable."
-Nick Greene, columnist at Slate, on Breach
If this email was forwarded to you and you'd like to sign up, just click here.