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
adopting ancient capacity cease fancy felt handy literate lose people perspective simply society socrates written
In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
gets politics pretend
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
All my characters are me, in one way or another.
amazon art dedicated production trust works
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
money
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
amount enormous life whether
An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
access great lead supposed work
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
arguably citizens common country executive power
Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.
exciting library plan staggering
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
delight happiness run seem
Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
reader though
I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.
constantly incredible
I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.
connery extremely grew moore movies ridiculous roger sean spies
I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
nearly stake wrote
I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.