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
male
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
legislate million people reach speech understanding voluntary whisper
With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.
both fascinated human individual
I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.
enormous room underneath work
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
brooding
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
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.
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.
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.
reader though
I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.
delight happiness run seem
Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
exciting library plan staggering
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
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.
access great lead supposed work
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
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.