In Ascension

I like newsletters that feel like letters: personal correspondence from an unusually interesting friend.

That’s why my newsletter is structured as a loose collection of field notes from my writing life—it’s the kind of letter I’d want to receive from one of my favorite authors.

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

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes is about a Dutch microbiologist who investigates two mysterious anomalies: one in a deep ocean trench and the other at the far reaches of the solar system. This is a science fiction novel that is also a book about doing science. Most of the characters are scientists or engineers working on complex, collaborative projects that go beyond any individual’s understanding, and the story makes you feel that you are forever on the verge of epiphany, that the impossibly sublime secrets of the universe are almost, but never quite, within your grasp.

Things worth sharing:

• It took a full thirty seconds for my first ride in a self-driving Waymo to go from “whoa!” to “ok whatever, time to check my phone.” The elasticity of human expectations when it comes to technological change is one of science fiction’s most significant lacunae.

• Real-life Reap3r: internet platforms for on-demand espionage.

• When I edit a manuscript, I’m always surprised to discover that how I felt while writing a given section—inspired, frustrated, focused, distracted, etc.—seems to have no relationship with how good the writing is.

• One reason that movies and novels have proven to be surprisingly resilient in an internet-first world is that dominant online formats like threads and TikToks are insufficiently immersive for fiction to work well, and people continue to enjoy the experience of being fully transported by a story as much as they ever have.

• Borderless came out six years ago and is at least as relevant today as it was then—I’d love to hear what you think if you give it a read. The East Bay Express calls it a “sharply rendered, wildly entertaining thriller speaking to the dangerous realities of our present.”

• If you think you’re acting on a system from the outside, you just haven’t yet realized that you’re actually inside it. Only people inside a machine can rage against it.

• I went on Interintellect to discuss science fiction and technological progress.

• You don’t make something people love by building what they ask for or by trying to infer a vision from data about their short-term behavior. Instead, you need to genuinely understand and care about the people you seek to serve, and then use your intuition to make something that they didn’t even realize they needed, that will light them up and feel like magic and make them feel understood and cared for. Sure, it might not work, but things that might not work are the only things worth working on.

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.

“Every empire builds an information infrastructure. Rome built roads. The British had an imperial telegraph system. What happens when the infrastructure is independent of the empires? That’s the fascinating question explored by Borderless, a novel of intrigue and action full of troubled heroes and imperfect compromises.”
-Peter Cowhey, dean of UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy & Strategy