Richard W. Bown
ALLi Author Member
Location: Netherlands (the)
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Dystopian, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction
I’ve spent most of my life building, supporting, and organising software systems, shaping software teams, and navigating the ways people and technology collide. Over time, I realised it wasn’t just systems that fascinated me; it was the people within those systems and how we make sense of our work and our relationships. That curiosity has slowly led me away from fixating on tools and processes, and hierarchies towards exploring the human experience in engineering. I write fiction, essays, and reflections that try to capture how people feel and change, the internal rhythms that shape what we do and why we do it, and the fragile, surprising, powerful stories stitched through everyday life. In 2025, I published my first novel, Human Software. I'm now working on the follow-up.
Richard W. Bown's books
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Thriller
Formats: E-Book, Audio, Paperback
Age Groups: 18+
Beth Walters is used to midnight phone calls. As the lead engineer keeping Gerbach’s crumbling logistics systems alive, she’s the last line of defence between Sandport’s fragile economy and corporate chaos. When a catastrophic outage strikes, Beth finds herself not just fighting code, but a new threat: Christine Hegarty, the ambitious American executive sent to slash costs and force through a risky AI project. With her job and her team’s future on the line, Beth navigates a workplace where loyalty is disposable and every mistake could be fatal. As layoffs loom and a public scandal erupts over a deadly data breach, the pressure mounts. Beth’s name is suddenly linked to the disaster, and the company she’s sacrificed everything for is ready to make her the scapegoat. Set in the decaying port town of Sandport, Human Software is a razor-sharp corporate drama about the people behind the machines, the cost of...