Category: books
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How to make sense of complex ideas
You know that feeling when someone is explaining an idea and you’re struggling to make sense of it—like peering out into dense fog, hoping to glimpse the outline of an approaching ship? Maybe it’s because they’re using unfamiliar acronyms or taking leaps of logic, or maybe it’s simply not something you have any personal experience…
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Creativity is a choice
It’s easy to make your creativity dependent on your environment. You can’t write that book until you escape to the perfect cabin in the woods. You can’t produce that song until you find the ideal recording studio. You can’t initiate that difficult conversation until the time is right. When I’m working on the rough draft…
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Paul McAuley on writing Anthropocene fiction
Paul McAuley’s Austral is a gorgeous, haunting novel—brimming with fractal stories-within-stories—about a fugitive on the run through the backcountry of the new nation established on a greening Antarctica. McAuley’s unskimmably precise prose conjure the bleak beauty of the internal and external landscapes the protagonist navigates as she tries to find her way in a world where…
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Veil
Veil is a character-driven science-fiction thriller set in a near-future where someone has hijacked the climate. 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 calls…
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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…
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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,…
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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. This blog exists thanks to…
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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…
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The life lesson that Edward Snowden learned from Super Mario Bros.
From Permanent Record: It was the NES—the janky but genius 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System—that was my real education. From The Legend of Zelda, I learned that the world exists to be explored; from Mega Man, I learned that my enemies have much to teach; and from Duck Hunt, well, Duck Hunt taught me that even…
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Ursula K. Le Guin on the book as technology
From Words Are My Matter: The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine;…