BETH WALTERS has kept Gerbach’s logistics systems running through sheer stubbornness and too many sleepless nights. She knows where the bodies are buried — technically speaking.
CHRISSIE HEGARTY has flown in from New York with a mandate, a deadline, and very little patience for sentiment. She’s done this before. She knows how it ends.
They are not enemies. Not yet.
“Vivid world-building and well-rounded characters. I found myself completely hooked.”
RUSSELL MCLEAN, Emmy and BAFTA award-winning Producer
Think you know how the tech world works?
Set in a decaying English port town, Human Software is a sharp, funny and quietly unsettling novel about ambition, loyalty, and what it costs to be human in a world increasingly run by machines.
Take a look behind the closed doors of corporate IT — the 3am callouts, the pointless standups, the executives who’ve never written a line of code making decisions that affect thousands of lives. Written by someone who spent thirty years inside that world.
But you don’t need to. 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, that grind them down.
Gene Kim’s The Phoenix Project meets Mike Judge’s Office Space in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.
“Absolutely gripping! A must-read”
LOVDEEP PANNU, CTO at Epicenter
“A proper page turner, part thriller, part whodunnit and a fine dystopian parable”
CHARLES HUMBLE, Tech consultant & Journalist
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.
The debut novel by Richard W. Bown, a three-decade survivor of corporate software engineering.
“Could not be more of the moment.”
CHARLES HUMBLE, Tech consultant & Journalist