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
appalling dropped knees knock knocked martial shocked sparring studied
I am the world's most appalling martial artist. I am so bad. I've studied jujitsu, kickboxing, t'ai chi. Once, I was sparring with someone, made a mistake, and managed to knock them down. I was so shocked that I dropped to my knees to see if they were all right, and then they knocked me out cold. From the floor.
The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
bubble early falsehood industry mirage obvious throughout
Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.
hard
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
feeling talk
I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged.
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.
appeals beings consumer human identities mainstream mapped perfectly putting recent sold technology
Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.
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.