Eliot Peper's Blog, page 6

Veil

[Drumroll. Rising strings. Lights!]

My new novel, Veil , is out today.

Veil is a character-driven science-fiction thriller set in a near-future shaped by geoengineering. Diplomats, hackers, scientists, spies, journalists, and billionaires grapple with the power and consequences of technology, life in the Anthropocene, and what it means to find a sense of agency in a world spinning out of control. August Cole, author of Ghost Fleet and Burn-In, calls it, "A brilliantly imagined eco-punk future filled with memorable characters locked in a life-or-death contest to control the direction of Earth's climate in the 21st century."

Get your copy of Veil right here.

I've always imagined literature to be a single extended conversation, and here are a few conversations that  Veil is contributing to: Seth Godin recommended Veil in Books for Spring, OneZero ran an exclusive excerpt, I partnered with Goodreads on this video tour of where and how I write, Andrew Liptak interviewed me about the inspirations behind the book, I went on the Technotopia podcast to discuss the creative process behind it, and Polygon featured it on their list of the best new science-fiction books. Some lovely reviews are bubbling up through the blogosphere here, here, here, here, and here. Oh, and tomorrow I'm doing a special live stream with Marija Gavrilov (RSVP to join us).

Books thrive on word-of-mouth, so the best way to support it and me is by helping the right people discover it. We all find our next favorite book through recommendations from people we trust. So if you read and love Veil , please leave an Amazon review and tell your friends about it. I know it might sound insignificant, but it makes all the difference in the world. Culture is a collective project in which all of us have a stake and a voice.

I poured my heart and soul into this book and it's my best work yet. As with any creative project in which you've invested years of your life, I'm simultaneously nervous and thrilled to share it. May it offer you welcome refuge, wellspring, and adventure in these strange times. Writing Veil changed my life, and my greatest aspiration is that reading it might enrich yours.

[Mic drop. Silent tears.]

Selected praise:

"Veil is about collapse, redemption, and heroes. As always, Peper's near-future science fiction will stick with you."
-Seth Godin, bestselling author and entrepreneur

"I love Eliot Peper. He consistently makes step function leaps in imagination and this book is so crazy relevant and timely."
-Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group

"Peper turns his attention to the future of geoengineering in his latest tech thriller. The lives of billions are at stake."
-Polygon

"A modern parable about ecological collapse, climate change, technology, and power."
-OneZero

"Technologists are inventing the future--a future cut through with their own flaws and hubris as much as it is informed by their ingenuity. Veil imagines a world in which truth, politics, and nature itself are at the mercy of human engineering, for better and for worse. This is an adventure that will stick with you long after you reach the end."
-Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist

"Interrogates Anthropocene themes with respect to their complexity and wickedness."
-Alternative Fictions

"Eliot Peper weighs the promises--and perils--of geoengineering in this tautly paced thriller which, in its final chapters, offers an intriguing solution and that most welcome of messages: a glimmer of hope."
-Meg Howrey, author of The Wanderers

(And I mean come on, just look at that cover!)

Speaking, media, and rights inquiries: eliot [at] eliotpeper [dot] com

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

What If a Tech CEO Tried to Save the World With Geoengineering?

OneZero just published an exclusive excerpt from my new novel (warning: minor spoilers):

As the climate crisis grows increasingly dire, a radical question is appearing on more politicians’ lips: What if we geoengineer our way out of the mess? The notion that we could reduce global temperatures with a sweeping technical fix and for relatively cheaply—by, say, spraying particulates into the sky to block the sunlight—is at first blush rather appealing. But then it would likely produce drastic and potentially devastating unintended consequences, too.

Enter Eliot Peper’s latest book, Veil. Peper’s work always has a ‘next five-minutes-to-five years in the future’ vibe, and the latest is no different; the speculative fiction writer has crafted a modern parable about ecological collapse, climate change, technology, and power.

“This scenario raises so many questions that will define the coming century: what does it mean to exist within an environment in which we ourselves are the primary agent of change?” Peper muses about the inspiration for Veil. “What will the future look like when technologies like nuclear weapons, CRISPR, the internet, and geoengineering can give a single human being the power to literally change the world?”

Good questions. To begin to explore the answers, we’re pleased to share an exclusive excerpt of Veil. Enjoy.

Preorder your copy of Veil right here and complement with this interview about what inspired the book, this podcast about the creative process behind it, and this thoughtful advance review.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Viktor Frankl on success

From Man's Search for Meaning :

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Complement with why successful people have no idea what made them successful, purpose is something you create for yourself, and do what matters.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Imagining the future

On May 21st, I'll be joining Marija Gavrilov to discuss how to think like a science-fiction writer:

Imagination and storytelling in times of crisis are powerful vectors for activating change.

We'll come together with science-fiction writers in a semi-bookclub format to discuss imagination, possible futures, and better worlds.

The first session is with Eliot Peper, whose latest speculative thriller Veil  (out May 20th) depicts a near-future shaped by the climate crisis and attempts at geoengineering.

RSVP to participate in the live event right here.

Complement with this podcast interview about science fiction and scenario planning, Your Strategy Is Your Story, and how I went about extrapolating the future described in Borderless.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Kim Stanley Robinson on how we live in a science fiction novel that we're writing together

From The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations:

These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling. 

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.

Complement with my conversation with Stan about writing New York 2140,  The Real Way Science Empowers Us, and Using science fiction to understand the future of the web.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Lewis Thomas on the awe-inspiring collective project of human language

From The Lives of a Cell :

There are lots of possibilities here, but if you think about the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the faintest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere, living out his brief life in a social enterprise that extends back into what is for him the deepest antiquity (ants die at the rate of 3-4 per cent per day; in a month or so an entire generation vanishes, while the Hill can go on for sixty years or, given good years, forever), performing his work with infallible, undistracted skill in the midst of a confusion of others, all tumbling over each other to get the twigs and bits of earth aligned in precisely the right configurations for the warmth and ventilation of the eggs and larvae, but totally incapacitated by isolation, there is only one human activity that is like this, and it is language. 

We have been working at it for what seems eternity, generation after articulate generation, and still we have no notion how it is done, nor what it will be like when finished, if it is ever to be finished. It is the most compulsively collective, genetically programmed, species-specific, and autonomic of all the things we do, and we are infallible at it. It comes naturally. We have DNA for grammar, neurons for syntax. We can never let up; we scramble our way through one civilization after another, metamorphosing, sprouting tools and cities everywhere, and all the time new words keep tumbling out.

Complement with Maria Popova on reality's density of wonder, Oliver Morton on humanity's fascination with the moon, and Kevin Kelly on how technology creates opportunity.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

The promises and perils of geoengineering

I went on the Technotopia podcast to talk to John Biggs about geoengineering, the future of climate change, and the inspirations behind my forthcoming novel, Veil .

Complement with my conversation with Andrew Liptak about Veil, how it feels to write fiction, and this podcast interview about how technology shapes society.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

John McPhee on writing as selection

From Draft No. 4 :

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That's a crude way to assess things, but it's all you've got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. 

Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more.

Complement with my interviews with authors about craft, how I wrote Borderless, and my advice for authors.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Cultivating a sense of presence

For me, writing fiction often boils down to cultivating a sense of presence, of being fully immersed in a scene, of stepping outside of self and into a character. It feels surprisingly similar to runner's high or meditation, only in this case thoughts are displaced by imagination.

Unfortunately, I find that maintaining that sense of presence while writing is usually just as hard as maintaining runner's high while running or maintaining a clear mind while meditating. Transcending self isn't a permanent achievement, but a process of constant renewal.

So when I write, run, or meditate and my thoughts inevitably get in the way, I try to remind myself that distraction isn't failure—distraction is an invitation to practice letting go and returning, once again, to that place of simple awareness, that sense of presence.

Complement with this interview about my creative process, what it feels like to write a novel, and how to overcome creative blocks.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Alix E. Harrow on opening doors to other worlds

Alix E. Harrow can spin a tale. Her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, is a no holds barred adventure full of heart and imagination in which a young girl discovers magic doors that lead to other worlds and must learn to harness her power to write changes into reality itself in order to untangle the secret history of her own origins. This is Indiana Jones meets Narnia, but smarter, subtler, and more culturally informed.

In the following conversation, we discuss what makes a great adventure great, the power of thresholds, and the creative process behind The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

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What is the origin story of The Ten Thousand Doors of January? How did it go from the first glimmer of an idea to the book I’m holding in my hands right now?

“Origin story” makes my book sound like a superhero or a notorious bank robber! The tidy comic book version of the story goes something like this: as a kid I fell in love with classic escapist children’s fantasy—Narnia, Oz, Wonderland, Neverland—and as a grad student I reevaluated them in a less flattering light. I began to see the cracks in their foundations, the shadows behind their smiles; they seemed less like escapism and more like imperialism. I started to wonder what it might look like to invert the power dynamics of a portal fantasy, to take out the cruelty but keep the wistful whimsy I’d loved as a kid.

I wrote the first draft over about three years, interrupted by the birth of my first kid. Somewhere in there I wrote a short story about librarian witches, published by Apex Magazine; an editor at Orbit read it and DM-ed me on Twitter to ask if, by chance, I had anything novel length, and then in a year and a half I got to see my book on a Barnes & Noble shelf.

There is an intoxicating amount of unabashed, unadulterated adventure in this story. What makes a great adventure great?

What I find really delightful about this question is that it reveals how subjective our reading experiences are. Readers who are accustomed to spy novels or thrillers or young adult fantasies might find The Ten Thousand Doors dull, but compared to, say, The Secret Garden , it’s a legit romp.

But I think what makes adventure great is more about what isn’t on the page than what is—it’s ships sailing toward unknown horizons, horses galloping into sunsets, the promise of something even grander and stranger off the margins of the map, unwritten.

Why are doors to other worlds such a powerful metaphor? What personal thresholds have you crossed that changed the course of your life?

Doors are the ultimate promise, aren’t they? Every closed door in a story is a perfect little Chekov’s gun, begging to be opened.

My personal thresholds are all the ordinary kind: new houses and apartments and cars, schools and colleges and office buildings. The one I remember best is the enormous arch where I married my husband, a tangle of grapevines and saplings my father lashed together especially for the occasion. He planted cardinal flowers around the base, so we were married on the threshold of a green and crimson door.

The story beautifully subverts many tropes, throwing the cultural assumptions behind them into stark relief. What anomalies did you notice in our world that you wanted to weave into this one?

There’s a part in Barrayar—a sci-fi romance I’ve read a very reasonable fifty or sixty times—where an outsider attempts to make a list of all the gender-specific social rules of a new planet. It’s a planet that was isolated for centuries and fell into a sort of faux-medieval feudalism, so all the rules on her list are very familiar to readers—about virginity and chastity, marriage and propriety--but seeing them through the eyes of an outsider makes them all so much weirder. So arbitrary and unfair, so transparently constructed. I read that book young, and it was one of the first times I really got that culture is just long-running group project, that things like patriarchy and racism are choices rather than inevitabilities.

And then in grad school I studied the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it felt like a moment when our present-day social hierarchies were being set in stone. So I guess I wanted readers to be able to see that, to see a culture in process, and the people who profited from it and the people who resisted it.

As January grew and changed throughout the story, how did you grow and change alongside her? How has she impacted your life or point of view?

Apparently it’s tacky to admit, but the truth is that January and I share more than a little DNA. I grew up bookish and isolated and wistful, longing for adventure; I fell in love with a good-hearted man with adorable crow’s-feet; I learned the (unbearably cheesy but very real) power of writing my own story.

But I also grew up a lot during the years I was writing this book. I got married. I had my first child. I found my sympathies splitting, and the story of January’s parents becoming more and more important to me.

What did writing The Ten Thousand Doors of January teach you about craft?

That it’s not necessarily advisable to do a multigenerational book-within-a-book with footnotes and alternating chapters for your first-ever novel! That I have to draft with absolute indulgence and edit with absolute sobriety; that em dashes are the coward’s semicolon.

What books do you love as much as January and Samuel love their story papers? What other books might fans of The Ten Thousand Doors of January enjoy?

Too many to list! I’m re-reading Naomi Novik’s Uprooted right now, which might be followed by a relapse into Robin McKinley. I’m clinging pretty hard to happily ever afters and true loves, these days.

As far as further reading for fans… If you like weird structures and magic doors, Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea is the perfect companion. If you like plucky Edwardian girls I recommend the 1995 movie version of A Little Princess . If you like books about books, H.G. Parry’s The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep is so smart and lovely. If you mostly just like the dog, I recommend the out-of-print, impossible-to-find Sinbad and Me by Kin Platt.

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Complement with Ted Chiang on the most interesting aspect of time travel, Meg Howrey on the inner lives of astronauts, and there aren't even any endings.
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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He sends a reading recommendation newsletter, hosts  Fellow Travelers , and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.