The work here comes out of certification engineering, which is an odd place for novels to come from... but it explains most of what I write. Certifying a safety-critical system means proving, on paper, that a thing will not fail in a way that hurts someone. Aircraft, cars, infusion pumps, reactor instrumentation. Twenty-eight years of it teaches one lesson above the others, and it is not a technical lesson. The machine is rarely what failed. Somebody had the evidence and it was inconvenient. Somebody else was three weeks from a delivery date that had already been given to a customer, and there was a reasonable-sounding argument for why the thing in front of them was close enough. The engineering is usually sound... it is the institution around it that gives way. That is what I keep writing about, in both registers. The essays describe it happening now. The novels put a person inside it and ask what it costs them. The engineering still pays the bills, under the name Adam Mackay and at [adammackay.com](https://adammackay.com). Two names, one preoccupation, and no disguise: it seemed better to say so once than to let someone find out later and wonder what else here was arranged for effect. --- ## Devon I live on the south Devon coast, a few miles from Brixham, which is why it rains for sixty-five years in *Beneath a Serpent Sky* and why the town in it is described with more accuracy than the plot strictly requires. --- ## Elsewhere - **[Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com)** — the essays - **[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/azmackay.bsky.social)** and **[X](https://x.com/azmackay)** — shorter thoughts - **[adammackay.com](https://adammackay.com)** — the engineering, the talks, the technical writing If you think I have the argument wrong, I would genuinely like to hear it... [say so](/contact).