If Cats Disappeared from the World
Word processors made it much easier to draft and edit prose, which is great and appreciated, but the hard problem for authors isn’t drafting or editing, it’s writing a book worth reading.
New creative tools can be wonderful, but they’re not the point. The point is to use whatever tools you like to make things people want, to bring joy and insight and understanding, to make good art.
And now, a book I love that you might too:
If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is about a postman with terminal cancer to whom the devil offers an oddly specific deal: live for an extra day if you agree to erase something from the world so thoroughly that it will be as if it had never existed to begin with. Funny and poignant, the story dances with philosophy without ever losing its intimately personal footing.
Things worth sharing:
The quality of the applicants responding to Chronicle Your Quest is extraordinary—it makes me wish I could gather all the subscribers to this newsletter in a room so you could see how amazing each other are.
Nine writers whose work is currently influencing mine: Claire Keegan, Morgan Housel, Nicola Griffith, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, Ada Palmer, Italo Calvino, Robin Sloan, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
I’m unreasonably pleased to have just heard from a group of French graduate students who read Veil and were moved to do a research project on the promise and peril of geoengineering. As a reader, my favorite books are portals into new worlds, new ways of seeing.
Detailed conversation about writing with one of my favorite authors, Amor Towles.
Kathy Varol recorded a wonderful podcast inspired by this passage from Foundry: “Plagued as they are by drought and wildfire, Californians love to talk about how water is power. They talk less about how power is water. Power flows through the social hierarchies we build to channel it, eroding them along the way. Sometimes it picks up silt over thousands of cycles, depositing it into the deltas we call institutions. You can dam it up to create authority or share it with irrigation. Every once in a while an unexpected earthquake like the invention of agriculture or nuclear weapons changes the landscape abruptly, but all that power never stops flowing, it just finds a new route back to the source.”
Ben Crowder featured Imagine the Reader in his latest link round-up.
Your body is always where you exist in physical reality. It is here, now. But at any given moment, your mind can either be here or elsewhere. There are many varieties of elsewhere: dream, memory, theory, story. You traverse them in the all-terrain vehicle called imagination. So if you write books, make movies, build apps, give lectures, or create art, it can be useful to ask yourself how you can construct an elsewhere worth visiting, and how people might return from the journey better able to face their here and now.
Prose is telepathy—each individual reader actively collaborates with the writer to simultaneously produce and experience the story—so the best writers are people we want to think with, as if we’re riding sidecar to their mental motorbike.
Salman Ansari, a subscriber to this newsletter, has a new book out—a collection of modern fables.
Getting good at anything takes practice. Practice takes time, so those who stick with it outcompete everyone else. It’s hard to stick with something you don’t enjoy, so the best way to get good is to choose something you find fun and then stick with it until you get good.
I bought Nvidia shares while researching and writing Foundry—it's not often a novel pays off this quickly.
Tom Crichtlow is a master of using narrative tools to help build businesses. I've learned a lot from his work, so it's fun to see mine appear in his latest riff.
I just packaged up another signed stack of my novels for a lucky reader. If you want a signed collection for yourself, you can order it directly from me.
In a world of infinite feeds, people underestimate the power of ending well. There are so many good series that would have been great if they had limited themselves to one or two seasons. It's sad when a promising project peters out, and eminently satisfying when someone closes a loop with conviction.
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.
“Reap3r is a rarity in contemporary science fiction—a smart, engaging and deeply humanistic work of futurism that keeps the pages turning with the material of real life.”
-Christopher Brown, Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy, and Campbell Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and Failed State