3 book recommendations for August, 2020
Last week I received an email that made my day. Reading Veil inspired the sender to organize a panel with leading researchers on the promises and perils of geoengineering for 23,000 students and graduates. He signed off with: "Fiction often can be a more effective spur to action than nonfiction."
A sneaky power of literature is that it sometimes opens windows through which readers can glimpse new worlds, or see their own from a new angle.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell is a sprawling, psychedelic novel that chronicles a '60s British pop band's journey from obscurity to stardom, with Mitchell's signature fantastical elements woven throughout. The structure of the novel mirrors the songs and albums of the fictional band, and in his prose descriptions of their music-making, you can occasionally stumble upon gems of insight from Mitchell's unique approach to writing fiction.
So You Want to Publish a Book? by Anne Trubek is a practical, accessible, and concise guide to book publishing that should be a must-read for aspiring and experienced authors, as well as anyone else curious about the complex and too-often opaque business of literature. I found this book so useful that I'm including it as a resource in my advice for authors.
The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer brings at least as much creative ambition to the social, political, and cultural aspects of its imagined future as to the technological elements that often dominate in works of science fiction. This is a story so full of nuance and complexity that having read it, you will find yourself examining your own life through ever-more-subtle lenses.
Bonus recommendation: My dad published a new book this week—a practical guide to understanding how technology impacts your health, and what to do to improve your overall wellness in a world where computers govern so much of our lives and work.
In other news:
Broken, but not irreparable: "If you’re doing something you already know how to do, you’re not being creative, you’re being productive. It’s only when you throw caution to the wind and yourself into the unknown that you’ll discover what you’re capable of and learn what the project has to teach you."
In a recent interview on the Tim Ferriss Show, Brad Feld recommended Veil alongside many of my favorite science-fiction books like The Fifth Season, Dune, Snow Crash, and Neuromancer.
Adii Pienaar had me on the inaugural episode of his new podcast to discuss how stories help us make sense of the world.
Stories are bicycles: "The characters are the pedals driving everything forward. The stakes are the gears ratcheting up and down. The plot is the wheels that take you where you’re going. The theme is the frame holding everything together. The power comes from you, the rider. You embark in one world and travel to another. Stories are bicycles: machines that move people."
How Technology And The Pandemic Are Bringing People Closer Together, Even As We're Physically Apart: "The science fiction author Eliot Peper—who's been on our podcast—has talked about how he's Zooming into book clubs to discuss his new book Veil, and that seems like a really cool thing that authors can do these days that actually allows them to connect to more fans and readers in an easier way than if everyone were going about their lives as normal."
Andy Sparks, founder of Holloway, highlighted True Blue in his running list of internet experiments in book publishing.
Burn-In author August Cole recommended Veil in his thought-provoking interview with Callaway Climate Insights: "Veil explores the great-game type politics around innovators developing terra-forming type climate technologies here on Earth as we fight, and sometimes even collaborate, to survive on a hotter planet."
I went on the Rocketship.fm podcast to talk about how Veil grew from an idea into a published novel, and the lessons I learned along the way.
Chapter 0: "How you describe what you make is a crucial part of how other people experience it."
Kai Brach invited me to contribute five recommendations to his consistently thought-provoking Dense Discovery newsletter.
Tom Crichtlow featured Veil in his reading list: "A really great fast-paced read. Eliot has a knack for constructing plausible near-futures and then situating fully realized human stories within those futures. Thought provoking and enjoyable."
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, Ars Technica, and the BBC. 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 Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. Subscribe to his blog here.
“I’m obsessed with Emily Kim. She’s this powerful, super-intelligent woman who has used her skills and her presence to grow a silent empire, only to have it all pulled out from under her. There’s always so much at stake in this near-future world.”
-Reviews & Robots on Breach
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