“Freaked me out more than any Stephen King.”
Jeremy Markey, Rands Slack Review
BETH WALTERS has kept Gerbach’s IT systems running through skill, stubbornness and too many sleepless nights. She works hard to support her family and community.
CHRISSIE HEGARTY is a new executive on a mission. She’s flown in from New York with a mandate, a deadline for change, and little patience for sentiment. She’s done this before. She thinks she knows how this ends.
They are not enemies. Not yet.
“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 obsessed with AI, datacentres and automating jobs away.
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.
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.
“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.
The debut novel by Richard W. Bown, a three-decade survivor of corporate software engineering.
“A proper page turner, part thriller, part whodunnit and a fine dystopian parable”
CHARLES HUMBLE, Tech consultant & Journalist