Category: writing

• Don DeLillo on the overview effect

  In “Human Moments in World War III” from The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, an astronaut gazes down at Earth from orbit:

  The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

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• Chapter 0

  Whether you make books, music, software, or sandwiches, how you describe what you make is a crucial part of how other people experience it.

  Some authors submit their manuscript and expect their publisher to handle the rest. But a book’s …

• Broken, but not irreparable

  Six weeks ago I finished the rough draft of a new novel. While I was writing it, this book felt perfect—a spitfire of a story. When I reached the end, I knew that, barring minor edits, it was ready …

• Stories are bicycles

  There’s a myth that puts storytellers on pedestals. It says that storytelling is the province of poets, novelists, and screenwriters. It says that there must be a moment of perfect inspiration, that the muse must whisper in your ear. It

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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• 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

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