Make art that makes people make art
I just got back from our annual camping trip to the secret lake in the High Sierras that inspired Ensorcelled.
While we were there, two friends mentioned that reading Ensorcelled inspired them to work on a special project, and proceeded to organize an extravagant treasure hunt for the entire group of thirty adults and a dozen children. The adventure featured music, costumes, wax-sealed lore scrolls, magic potions, rune stones, treasure chests, dragons, naiads, a flotilla of watercraft navigating the lake’s archipelago, and a celebratory feast.
It was tremendous fun, and a lovely illustration of culture as conversation. The lake inspired the book, the book inspired the treasure hunt, the treasure hunt inspired this very sentence, etc.
Make art that makes people make art.
A book I love that you might too
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is honestly not the kind of book that I’d normally gravitate to, but I picked it up at the insistence of a trusted friend, and I am so glad I did because it’s so damn good. The story follows two ex-Texas Rangers driving a herd of cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. McMurtry is a master storyteller and it won’t be long until you find yourself caring deeply about the wide cast of well drawn characters and wanting to find out how their lives inevitably intersect. Life on the frontier was hard, and this book transports you into the minds and hearts of people who inhabited that time and place, not flinching away from the violence and suffering that was all too common, but not relishing it either, and instead showing us what made them who they were, so that we might gain a new vantage on ourselves.
Nothing is better at being a book than a book
Books have survived the arrival of radio, movies, tv, the internet, phones, and AI because they have unique affordances that newer mediums have yet to infringe upon (those mediums each have wonderful unique affordances of their own). As James Cham says, “More hours of enjoyment than a movie; deeper engagement than a reel; less fleeting than a podcast.”
A writerly gripe
It's 2026, computers can program themselves, and Google Docs, a product from the company that brought you transformers, still doesn't support dark mode in the web editor.
Writing can unlock new ideas
Some people write because they have something to say. For them, writing is about articulating a preexisting idea.
I write to think things through. For me, writing is about discovering new ideas I couldn’t have reached any other way. The fact that those ideas are made legible to others is a glorious side effect.
Measuring chocolate in elephants
The Dandelion Chocolate Factory features a uniquely San Franciscan dedication to craft and ambitious adoption of automation. I highly recommend taking a tour. With only twelve production staff, they can produce 10,000 chocolate bars per day, or, memorably, “28 elephants per year.” The production staff we saw were all managing machines, not manually making or wrapping chocolate. I love chocolate, and theirs is the best I’ve ever tasted.
Here’s a Physical Intelligence robot folding boxes in a new prototype process.
How do I write science fiction in the AI age?
I get asked this question a lot. Here’s my approach:
Be curious about science and technology and the role they play in our lives and world.
Inhabit unevenly distributed pockets of the future, and befriend fellow denizens of such.
Ask interesting what-if questions inspired by the above, and when you can't get a particular one out of your head, write a novel about it.
Of course, nothing's changed: this is how I've always written science fiction.
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 twelve novels, including Foundry, Bandwidth, Cumulus, and, most recently, Ensorcelled. He is also the head of story at Tolan and works on special projects.
“This is the best kind of science fiction.”
-Kim Stanley Robinson on Veil