*A Z Mackay* # Novels and essays about systems that outgrew their keepers Three novels, and an essay most weeks on what the machines are doing to the people who have to live with them. [The Fiction](/fiction) [Future Tense](/future-tense) ## The work ### Fiction Literary speculative fiction, built on engineering that would actually work. A Devon town under sixty-five years of rain. A private space programme (hidden from both Cold War superpowers). A company town on Mars with an illegal racing circuit running through it. Three novels, at three stages... [read about them →](/fiction) ### Future Tense Essays on what a technology is already doing to the people living beside it. Aquifers and algorithms, data centres in orbit, the salesperson who has moved into your head. More than two hundred pieces, as at July 2026. [What Future Tense is →](/future-tense) --- ## Where to start For the fiction, *Beneath a Serpent Sky* is the clearest statement of what I am doing. An old man walks back into a town it has not stopped raining on since 2032, and starts asking who signed off on it. For the essays, [Future Tense](/future-tense) has a short list of ways in, arranged by what you are curious about rather than by date. The argument underneath both is that advanced technology fails socially before it fails technically. Everything here is a version of that. I did not arrive at it by reading. I spent decades building the systems, and then started asking the wrong questions. [More about that →](/about)