3 book recommendations for March, 2022
A useful measure of success for creative work is how much quality time it enables you to spend with people whose creative work you admire. I’m surprised by and grateful for how this newsletter has become a vehicle for spending quality time with you.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer is the final installment in her four-part science-fiction masterpiece, Terra Ignota. Supremely entertaining, thought-provoking in the extreme, deeply moving, and packed with insight on political, social, cultural, and technological aspects of historical change, this is a novel that will echo in your mind and heart long after you turn the final page. I am constantly recommending this series to friends.
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson is a history of human networks that illuminates how the structure of the relationships between people exert at least as much influence on events as people themselves. Ferguson crosses centuries and continents in pursuit of compelling examples that illustrate how networks shape our world and ourselves.
Stardust by Neil Gaiman is a perfect fairytale for adults. It follows a boy who sets out on a quest into the faerie forest bordering his ordinary village, and evolves into a grand adventure brimming with magic, adversity, courage, imagination, and self-discovery. Sure to spark your sense of wonder.
Bonus recommendation: Novel Brewing crafted a beer to pair with my novels—how cool is that?! If you’re in the Bay Area, go give it a try and tell them I sent you.
Things worth sharing:
My new novel, Reap3r, comes out May 18th and I’m in the midst of preparing to narrate the audiobook—recording starts next week. Oh, and a new blurb just came in from Samuel Arbesman: “Reap3r is fast-paced and chock-full of ideas, weaving together scientific and technological wonders with deeper questions around the human condition—a delight from start to finish.” Preorder now!
Whenever our jasmine blooms I imagine it’s a towering, monolithic solarpunk civilization a la SimCity 2000 arcologies—every flower a neighborhood, every curling tendril a graphene spire.
It’s been really moving to hear what this little blog post about rugby meant to so many of you. I want to tell stories that make people want to tell their own stories, and it’s a joy to see you paying it forward.
Something I love about prose fiction is how it synthesizes sensing, thinking, feeling, and doing—a rich simulacrum of direct experience. Nonfiction can achieve this range, but usually doesn’t for good reasons, e.g. journalists can’t directly report subjects’ interiority.
From my interview with the Chicago Review of Books about Borderless: “The feed is inevitable to the extent that it is useful. Every minute of every day, 156 million emails are sent, 400 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube, and there are 600 new page edits to Wikipedia. There is so much more information than we can possibly digest, and feeds are the imperfect filters that try to distill what we want from what’s out there. But their imperfections generate horrendous side effects, like unjust parole decisions made on the basis of racially biased data. And even more fundamentally, the sheer scale of feeds gives their masters enormous hidden power. In a world awash in information, the curator is king.”
Art is often described from the artist's point of view: an act of self expression. But it's at least as useful to think about art from the audience's point of view: a vehicle for experience, a point of connection, a tool for thought.
From my conversation with Stewart Brand about writing The Maintenance Race: “Maintainers are scholars of causation. They have to figure out why something stopped working, and it can be maddening. Each success is a compelling detective story. Once they understand the problem, they have to figure out what to do. Each of those successes is a caper story.”
Self-reliance is overrated. Civilization is interdependence: everyone making progressively more specialized things for each other, from guacamole to Wordle, mRNA vaccines to the happy birthday song. Sometimes it’s scary to be so entangled, but it’s also profoundly beautiful.
Generating ideas is intrinsically fun, but writing them down and publishing them on the internet turns your ideas into serendipity factories.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoy my writing and want to support it, invest in my creative process so I can do more of it. Oh, and tell your friends. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.
Best, Eliot
Eliot Peper is the author of Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He publishes a blog, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.
“Cumulus takes off like a Falcon 9 rocket, immediately propelling the reader into a world of sinister intrigue and deceit. You should read it right now, before it happens for real. Highly recommended.”
-Popular Science on Cumulus
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