“Freaked me out more than any Stephen King.”
Jeremy Markey, Rands Slack Review
BETH WALTERS is used to midnight calls as the engineer keeping Gerbach’s failing logistics systems alive. When another global outage hits, Beth discovers that fixing the code won’t be enough.
CHRISSIE HEGARTY is an ambitious American executive with a mandate to transform the company using AI, no matter the human cost.
As pressure builds, Beth is forced to choose between loyalty and survival.
“Could not be more of the moment.”
CHARLES HUMBLE, Tech consultant & Journalist
“Absolutely gripping! A must-read”
LOVDEEP PANNU, CTO at Epicenter
Think you know how the tech world works?
Set in a decaying English port town, Human Software is a sharp, wry and quietly unsettling novel about ambition, loyalty, and what it costs to be human in a world increasingly run by machines. The 3 am callouts, the executives who’ve never written a line of code, making decisions that affect thousands of lives, the slow realisation that the system was never on your side.
The world of Sandport, Kent, is vividly real whether you’ve worked in tech or never touched a keyboard. This is ultimately a story about people, and the systems, corporate and human.
For readers of William Shaw and Ian McEwan. A dark, intelligent novel about corporate rot, coastal Britain, and the people the system is designed to grind down.
“Vivid world-building and well-rounded characters. I found myself completely hooked.”
RUSSELL MCLEAN, Emmy and BAFTA award-winning Producer
About the book
Software runs the world. Most of us just don’t see how or what it takes to keep it running.
Human Software pulls back the curtain on a world where the systems have to keep working 24/7, where careers are made and broken in a moment, and where the humans behind the code are the last thing anyone thinks about until everything goes wrong.
Human Software is the debut novel by Richard W. Bown, a three-decade survivor of corporate IT and software engineering.
“A proper page turner, part thriller, part whodunnit and a fine dystopian parable”
CHARLES HUMBLE, Tech consultant & Journalist