Excellent Advice for Living

I just finished recording the Foundry audiobook.

As a child, I’d walk to the local public library and borrow the max allotment of books-on-tape. I listened to them on a cassette player, some many times over. I’m pretty sure I wore out the tape on Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park through multiple listenings. At home, I’d eat a snack, usually chips and salsa, and lose myself in a well-told story. On family roadtrips, I’d sit in the back seat of our minivan with my headphones on and watch the landscape slide by as imagined worlds formed and faded in my imagination.

So it was a special experience to sit on the other side of the mic and narrate Foundry. I often read out loud to myself while editing a manuscript. It helps me feel out the rhythm of the prose and notice new problems and opportunities. But reading it out loud as performance takes it to another level entirely. Narrating Foundry gave me a new perspective on the novel, a deeper understanding of the characters, and, hopefully, a new point of connection with you: my listeners and readers.

The Foundry audiobook comes out on October 11th alongside the hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions (if you want a signed hardcover, you can preorder directly from me here). I can’t wait to hear what you think.

And now, a book I love that you might too:

Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly is a collection of aphorisms that each offer a lens for looking at the world differently. Every pithy nugget is a tool for thought, a way of seeing. Some are practical. Some are philosophical. All are generous. This is a book to turn to when you want to remind yourself of what’s important, a cornucopia of timeless wisdom you already feel the truth of, but perhaps haven’t articulated yet.

Things worth sharing:

• Over in Every, I published an essay about how to become a better conversationalist: “When someone asks you a question, most of the time they don’t really care about the answer. What they actually want is for you to tell them something interesting. They are fishing for your best material, each question a line cast in hope of hooking whatever lurks in your secret depths.”

• Always a delight to stumble on something you made in a newsletter you love, in this case the inimitable Robin Sloan’s: “Eliot Peper’s new novel, titled Foundry, arrives in October. I’m very excited for this one, because it’s set in the milieu of semiconductor manufacturing, an industry that is, in its real-world importance and secrecy, totally thriller-worthy.”

• One of the coolest applications of AI I've encountered: making it orders of magnitude easier to design and build new hardware products.

• Alan Kay, A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages: “Where some people measure progress in answers-right/test or tests-passed/year, we are more interested in Sistine-Chapel-Ceilings/Lifetime."

• In a world full of interview podcasts, Conversations with Tyler is like no other: guests from many and varied fields, questions that dig so much deeper than standard bio and talking points. I've learned so much listening to it—and this particular episode inspired Veil!

• Funny how important Turing thought it would be to test machines to verify intelligence when it turns out that the ubiquitous thing is machines testing to verify humanity with CAPTCHAs.

• Wonderful advance review of Foundry from Don Houts and generous shout-out in Danny Crichton’s Securities.

• In screenwriting, a MacGuffin is a plot device that’s irrelevant in itself, like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. MacGuffins are easy to criticize, but they’re truer to life than most give them credit for: as soon as you get what you want, you realize it’s not what you need.

• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: "Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it."

• Because most people assume they can only achieve average outcomes, it’s less competitive to pursue truly great outcomes. Don’t discount yourself.

• For your summer reading pleasure, these are the best books I read in 2022.

• Remember: Less news. More novels.

Thanks for reading. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. So when you fall in love with a story, tell your friends. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.

Best, Eliot

Eliot Peper is the author of Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He also consults on special projects.

“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