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
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.
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.
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.
The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
changes food gets house kids manic might parent people poor sentinel sharp subtle threat
Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring.
argue believe issue lies nature newspapers rarely time
I'm not an absolutist about free speech. Intellectually, I believe that most of the time it's better to let things get said, argue them, and put lies and stupidities to rest. Practically, I know that newspapers rarely issue corrections with the same prominence they give to denouncements - and Twitter, by its nature, never does.
literary mainstream technology
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
knowledge power
Knowledge is not just power - it is control.
shotgun
'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.
analyze classic detective filter handy structures work
As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
alarm anger challenge complaints deeper government national protect punish quite serious shallow tender
The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
capacity extend genuine internet power
The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.
controls display electronic gorgeous paper perfectly physical plastic presented transform
E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.
saying
There's a saying in the movie industry that if your movie is about what you actually think it's about, you're in big trouble. I think it's the same with books.