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
bodies design ethos home understand
We are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers.
baggage choosing whether
Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own.
boys discovered felt lots sat
I think lots of boys sat down with 'The Three Musketeers' and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story.
front north
'Tigerman' was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.
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I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.
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Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard.
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My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science. I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end, if something has to go 'boom,' and it would probably only go 'fwoosh,' I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not, I think, a grave one.
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Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs.
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My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great.
family relationship
My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
time work
When the time comes to work, I work.
along names people time
I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.
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We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.
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We need to differentiate between commercial piracy - where criminal organisations produce illicit DVDs on a huge scale - and domestic, unauthorised filesharing, which may or may not be detrimental to overall sales.