Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkawayis a novelist and commentator. He is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker and Tigerman; and a non-fiction study of the digital world, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
allow bleak cannot government simply war
We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.
attracts human naked parts people pleasing reason technology visible whose
The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.
identify inherent lived proposed races theorists variations
Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.
drift limbo stories vast whose
We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.
wine sunshine dark
I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.
retirement real love-you
A woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that.
support answers want
We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.
swings errors tree
The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.
photography lying cat
Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.
philosopher language habit
It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.
one-day remarkable ifs
If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.
technology magic threshold
It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.
space people maps
I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.
tupperware
That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.