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
attracts human naked parts people pleasing reason technology visible whose
The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.
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.
close mind neighbours people separated social technology
In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind - people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest.
technology magic threshold
It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.
literary mainstream technology
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
drift limbo stories vast whose
We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.
allow bleak cannot government simply war
We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.
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.
performance
Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
careful leave room themselves turn
Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
means nature prize prizes
Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery.
advertising afford amazon apple companies continue control google models publishing route sells tied
Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
home nick partly pseudonym quite sounds
I wanted a pseudonym partly because I'm quite shy and private. I know that sounds ludicrous, but if I should be lucky enough to make a hit, I wanted to be able to shrug off the mantel of Nick Harkaway when I got home.
across assumption borrow both capitalism free medical people rational relatively simple
At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.