3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
I recently cleaned out my parent’s basement and discovered a tattered cardboard box in the back corner under a bunch of old toys and dusty ski gear. The box was full of books I had treasured as an adolescent. My middle school gave each eighth-grader a book of their choice as a graduation gift. Standing there in the basement twenty years later, I opened the box to discover my copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, spotted with mold spores and complete with a signed note from the principal. That book cast a strange sort of spell on me, cast fresh shadows across my world, and gave me a new perspective on what technology and literature can do.
So, as you can imagine, it was a real treat for me to have the opportunity to interview Gibson about tracking reality's "Fuckedness Quotient" and the creative process behind his new novel, Agency. You can find more of my conversations with authors about craft and big ideas here.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Agency by William Gibson is a kinetic thrill-ride through an unevenly distributed future that reflects how aggressively weird life has become as we embark on the century’s third decade. Populated by app-whisperers, spooks, and hackers, Agency grapples with literally revisionist histories, the branching, unpredictable nature of all the possible futures that splay out from the fulcrum of our present, and just how difficult it is to achieve “agency” in a culture spiraling out of control.
1491 by Charles C. Mann uses current and emerging historical, anthropological, and archaeological evidence to paint a sweeping picture of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. Mann was inspired to write this book when he realized that the "history" taught in American schools was more than fifty years out of date, and desperately inaccurate. 1491 corrects countless misconceptions and will challenge you to reframe everything you thought you knew about the history and future of the continent.
Get Together by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto is an actionable manifesto for how to go about building a community from the ground up. Whether you're an activist, an artist, an entrepreneur, or simply someone who wants to find new ways to be there for your friends and loved ones, you'll find many useful insights in this lovely, concise, accessible book.
Bonus recommendation: The Sleep Consultant by Robin Sloan was the best short story I read last year. Fair warning: It will weave itself into the fabric of your dreams.
In other news:
My advice for authors: "Don’t listen to advice, including mine. Live your life. Pay attention. Follow your curiosity. Spend less than you earn. Read books you love. Write books you want to read. Share them with people you care about. Write more books. Make every story better than the last. Pour your heart into every scene, every moment. Take your work seriously and yourself much less seriously. Ask hard questions. Challenge assumptions. Take charge of your career, build direct relationships with your readers, and put their interests above everyone else’s. Eat, sleep, and exercise. Be kind, generous, patient, and brave, especially in the face of adversity. Take the long view. Engage in deep conversations. Experiment. Have fun. Forge your own path."
Hao Nguyen interviewed me about creative process, motivation, and workflow for Balance the Grind: "I follow my curiosity. I used to read books that felt 'serious' or 'important.' I constantly found that I didn’t have time to read, and that when I did, it felt like work. Then I switched things up and whenever something piqued my interest, I’d lose myself in that rabbit hole until my enthusiasm waned, and consequently waxed for something else. Now I read fast and my intellectual curiosity is insatiable. It’s the primary guidepost that informs my work and life."
My interview with Nick Harkaway about writing Gnomon was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award: "Science fiction is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, science fiction has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that."
Tom Standage wrote a thought-provoking article about the feedback loop between science fiction and real world tech for The Economist in which he quoted from an essay I wrote a few years back: "Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2017, Eliot Peper, a novelist, argued that science fiction is valuable 'because it reframes our perspective on the world'. Business leaders should read sci-fi, he suggested, because exploring fictional futures 'frees our thinking from false constraints' and 'challenges us to wonder whether we’re even asking the right questions'."
Line from my work-in-progress: "Clouds whipped past, turning the windows into blank panes displaying nothing but the fact that they were in a machine flown by a machine, two humans huddled in the center of a matryoshka of generations of technology lacquered onto itself."
Ted Chiang on the most interesting aspect of time travel: "Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons."
From my conversation with Gibson: "Even before we became as aware as some of us now are of climate change, and of the fact that our species has inadvertently caused it, we seemed to be losing our sense of a capital-F Future. Few phrases were as common throughout the 20th Century as 'the 21st Century', yet how often do we see 'the 22nd Century'? Effectively, never."
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
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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.
“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.”
-ZDNET on Breach
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