3 book recommendations for October, 2020
With wildfires, heatwaves, melting Arctic sea ice, and the election in the headlines, I’m receiving lots of reader emails about parallels to Veil and the Analog Series.
Remember: Society isn’t inevitable, but invented, and—with sufficient creativity, determination, and generosity—subject to reinvention.
And now, books I love that you might too:
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson follows scientists, diplomats, and activists working across decades and continents to forge a future you might actually want to live in from the shattered remains of a civilization on the brink. I love so many things about this novel—its sprawling future history, its rigorous picture of institutional change, its structure of feeling, its cascading collisions of big ideas—but what resonates most deeply is that this is a book about and for practical, determined people working to make a messy, complicated world better. Like Veil, the story kicks off with a deadly global heat wave that begets a controversial geoengineering scheme—a parallel that inspired a wonderful correspondence.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason is a novel that extends Homer's Odyssey through a delightful conceit: a new cache of archaeological evidence has been found, and each chapter translates a tale contained in these lost texts. Endlessly inventive, these fragmentary stories remixing the epic poem's formulae coalesce into a subversive literary mosaic sure to spark your imagination.
The End of October by Lawrence Wright is an exceedingly compelling, deeply researched technothriller that extrapolates the cascading consequences of a deadly global pandemic. Published in April, it feels like each and every one of us is now an extra in this page-turner, with chilling implications. You won't be able to put it down, and you'll learn a lot about epidemiology along the way.
Bonus recommendation: Text-only NPR is officially my favorite news site. Without the images, ads, banners, popups, and extraneous flourishes that plague so many of its competitors, the stories can stand alone, and must earn their place. Elegant, effective design.
In other news:
From my conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson: "The moment we’re living through now is a kind of interregnum, the space between two moments with their respective structures of feeling. The in-between can be acutely uncomfortable but also a space of freedom as old habits have ended but new ones not yet been settled. Proust called this the moment of exfoliation, when you shed one skin and grow another. It’s not comfortable, but it is interesting."
When you choose a book to read, an album to listen to, a series to binge, or a newsletter to subscribe to, you are constructing a personal micro-culture that will inform how you live, what you do, and who you become. Invest your attention with intention. Share on Twitter.
Line from my work-in-progress: "He could spend the rest of his life untangling the baroque knots of quantum computer science—and let the United States government weaponize the fruits of his labor. Or he could watch as the progress bar ended the only life he’d ever known."
Bandwidth just passed 1,100 Amazon reviews! You are the best readers any writer could hope for.
Lasting value: "One filter I use for choosing creative projects is: will this be of lasting value? Only time will tell, but asking the question helps weed out what the culture is overflowing with: fleeting commentary on current affairs. Your life—your entire world!—is your material. Seek out patterns. Explore what lies beneath."
For the Dutch and Belgian readers out there, Newsweek published an in-depth profile on me and Veil.
And for the German readers out there, 1E9 featured Veil in its guide to the season's best science-fiction novels.
You attend a cocktail party at a baroque mansion. Guests include everyone you've loved, hated, admired, despised. Every room is unique—idiosyncratic music, lighting, atmosphere, milieu. You can move from one to the next, but you can never go back. Each threshold is a death. Share on Twitter.
There's a specific house along Claremont Canyon trail that inspired Huian Li's pad in Cumulus. Whenever I hike past it, I turn to look out over the Bay Area and imagine the novel's Green Zone, Fringe, and Slums layered on real neighborhoods.
Now is a great time to read Malka Older's near-future Centenal Cycle, which imagines a new path forward for internet-enabled democracy.
In a recent New York Times article—"As Climate Disasters Pile Up, a Radical Proposal Gains Traction"—Christopher Flavelle writes about the real-world scientists, investors, and policymakers working on the precise scenario extrapolated in Veil.
I never suspected pears could be so fascinating.
If reading Veil's prologue sparked your curiosity about the Don DeLillo quote Miranda uses for her book's epigraph, you can read it here.
Unless you decide what is important to you and make time to achieve it, life's endless urgencies will get in the way. Purpose is not something you find, but something you choose. Share on Twitter.
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, tell your friends. Every month, I 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 grow. In an age of digital abundance, quality is the new scarcity. The right book at the right time can change your life.
When I'm not reading books, I'm writing them. If you savor the promise and peril of new worlds opening up, if you prefer hard questions to easy answers, if you seek adventures that will transport you and leave you changed, then you're the kind of person I write for. You can find my novels right here. Bon voyage, fellow traveler.
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.
“A riveting cautionary tale about how the control of information could lead to new forms of democratic governance, or to accidental empires. Rooted in the current realities of the internet and social media, Borderless explores a near future in which our lives are shaped without our conscious consideration.”
-Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, on Borderless
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