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Nick Harkaway

Goodreads Author

Born

in Truro, The United Kingdom

Website

http://www.nickharkaway.com

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Mystery & Thrillers, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Influences

William Gibson, Georges Simenon, Anne Michaels, Anne Carson, Annie Pro ...more

Member Since

June 2008

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/nickharkaway

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Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall, UK in 1972. He is possessed of two explosively exciting eyebrows, which exert an almost hypnotic attraction over small children, dogs, and - thankfully - one ludicrously attractive human rights lawyer, to whom he is married.

He likes: oceans, mountains, lakes, valleys, and those little pigs made of marzipan they have in Switzerland at new year.

He does not like: bivalves. You just can't trust them.

...more

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Popular Answered Questions

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Nick Harkaway ARGH! There's no such thing. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that …moreARGH! There's no such thing. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills. For example: very often, around the middle of a book, I grind to a halt. I can go no further, everything I write is catastrophically stupid. I tend to get very upset about that, and I'm unmentionably annoying to be around for a few days. My wife generally has to remind me how to fix the problem.

The way you fix it is you go back to the beginning and you get rid of all the junk, broken stuff you put in back before you understood what the hell the book was actually about, the stuff that is now preventing you from doing the really amazing things that will make the book special. You have to re-envision the whole thing, understand what you meant but could not at the time express. Sometimes that means cutting heavily, sometimes it means changing great swathes, sometimes it's a question of reading that crucial passage that carries your book in potential and taping it up over your desk.

Calling that moment "writer's block" is slandering yourself. It's not a block, it's the process. Don't demonise it! Beg for it! It's what stops you from writing lousy prose, saggy plots, unsatisfying endings. LOVE YOUR CRITICAL FACULTY.

Alternatively: at any time in the course of a book, I may find I cannot write it, bash away at it, hate myself, and then realise it's because I haven't done my chores. I haven't paid the credit card bill or whatever.

Understand: your ability to write is bound up with who you are and with your moods. It is tied to whether you are happy, sad, tense, relaxed, blah. It is you. So when something is wrong with your inkflow, that means either that you've goofed creatively or that you're not fixing something broken elsewhere in your world.

Love your mutant power. Do not try to force it to do something. Learn to listen.(less)

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How do you get inspired to write?

Nick Harkaway Weeeeellllll, I get ideas the way you get hit by raindrops if you go outside in a storm. Some of them are good and if I'm lucky they collide with othe…moreWeeeeellllll, I get ideas the way you get hit by raindrops if you go outside in a storm. Some of them are good and if I'm lucky they collide with other ideas and then I have a story. Some of them are awful. Really, really awful. I sit bolt upright in bed and shout something about how I'm a genius and I write it all down and I wake in the morning to a note about how bananas are going to kill the King of Silesia and take over the world, and only a trained monkey called Newton, armed with a grocer's apron wrapped around the skull of a dead saint, can possibly save us. And I look at that and I have to admit that while it possesses the virtue of originality it is clearly crap.

But every so often ideas collide and produce something exciting, and then it's not a question of persuading myself to write, but of budgeting time to do other things like eat.

Where ideas come from... I think that's about taking the brakes off your mind. We're all trained as kids to stop thinking the ridiculous things and be sensible, and writing is about recapturing the possibility that there are invisible mousemonsters that sneak onto buses and chew the furniture and they are kept in line by a young woman with a magic accordion. It's about permitting yourself to touch the weird in search of the amazing.(less)

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Combine Editions
Nick Harkaway’s books

Average rating: 3.98 · 44,367 ratings · 6,307 reviews · 28 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Gone-Away World 4.10 avg rating — 13,643 ratings — published 2008 — 33 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Angelmaker 3.93 avg rating — 10,465 ratings — published 2012	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Titanium Noir (Titanium Noir, #1) 4.03 avg rating — 6,764 ratings — published 2023 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gnomon 3.85 avg rating — 5,990 ratings — published 2017 — 16 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tigerman 3.93 avg rating — 5,580 ratings — published 2014 — 23 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Edie Investigates 3.87 avg rating — 743 ratings — published 2012 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses 3.72 avg rating — 276 ratings — published 2014 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Blind Giant 3.69 avg rating — 217 ratings — published 2012 — 12 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gnomon : Tome 1 by Nick Harkaway (Goodreads Author), Michelle Charrier (Traduction) 3.37 avg rating — 41 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gnomon : Tome 2 by Nick Harkaway (Goodreads Author), Michelle Charrier (Traduction) 3.39 avg rating — 18 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Nick Harkaway…

15 posts
Nick Harkaway's Blog

New Book: TIGERMAN

My new book, Tigerman, is coming out on May 22nd in the UK, June 2nd in Australia and July 29th in the US.

(Sorry, Americans: I do try, every time, to get them all sync'd, but the publishing industry doesn't take to it.)

I'm doing a bunch of publicity stuff around it and of course I'll be at some festivals this year - Hay and Edinburgh to name the two big'uns - and I'll be at the Literary Death Matc Read more of this blog post »

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Published on May 08, 2014 06:33 • Tags: literary-fiction, new-book, novel, superhero, thriller, tigerman

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Series by Nick Harkaway

Titanium Noir (2 books)
by

Nick Harkaway (Goodreads Author)

4.03 avg rating — 6,761 ratings

Gnomon (2 books)
by

Nick Harkaway (Goodreads Author),

Michelle Charrier (Traduction)

3.37 avg rating — 59 ratings

Related News

Interview with Nick Harkaway

On a radioactive island a middle-aged British sergeant becomes a crime-fighting superhero in Tigerman, a genre-bending adventure from the author of...

Polls

4th Quarter 2018 - SciFi #1

A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White, 480p

7 votes, 29.2%

Rosewater by Tade Thompson, 432p

6 votes, 25.0%

Darknet by Matthew Mather, 371p

4 votes, 16.7%

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton, 768p

3 votes, 12.5%

Thrawn by Timothy Zahn, 427p (Oct)

2 votes, 8.3%

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, 704p

1 vote, 4.2%

The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds, 502p

1 vote, 4.2%

Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio, 624p

0 votes, 0.0%

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, 351p

0 votes, 0.0%

24 total votes

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Topics Mentioning This Author

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SciFi and Fantasy...: What are you reading in August 2010?	97	226	Sep 02, 2010 06:16AM
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The Sword and Laser: Our Next book perhaps?	90	268	Apr 18, 2011 02:18PM
SciFi and Fantasy...: What are new-in-2011 books are you looking forward to reading?	246	436	May 21, 2011 10:01PM
readers advisory ...: Humorous Sci-Fi/Fantasy.	27	141	Oct 12, 2011 04:16PM
The Sword and Laser: Usable to-read lists	28	107	Dec 08, 2011 04:36PM
The Sword and Laser: 2012	21	128	Feb 16, 2012 11:53AM

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Nick’s Quotes

“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

tags: experience, mystical-encounter, reality, unicorn

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