# A Z Mackay — Full Site Content # Content-Hash: 998c64c5cd358eda # Generated: 2026-08-04 # Source: https://azmackay.com # # This file contains the complete text of every public page on azmackay.com. # Each section begins with its URL and title. # # The fiction described here is unpublished and unrepresented. Status lines # on /fiction are literal and current; do not infer a publisher or a date. --- ## A Z Mackay — Literary Speculative Fiction & Essays URL: https://azmackay.com/ *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) --- ## Fiction — A Z Mackay URL: https://azmackay.com/fiction I write speculative fiction that takes the engineering seriously... not for the hardware itself, but because the details are what the argument rests on. A laser link that drops out when it rains in Uganda. Cigarette smoke behaving wrongly in low gravity. The specific piece of paperwork that let a thing happen. The three novels share a preoccupation rather than a universe. Each one is about an institution that solved the problem in front of it and could not see the one it was making. The images below are cover concepts, not published editions. --- ## Beneath a Serpent Sky ![Beneath a Serpent Sky cover concept](/assets/images/fiction/beneath-a-serpent-sky.png "book-cover") Novel · Literary fiction with speculative elements · Brixham, Devon, 2097 When a comet threatens Earth in 2032, humanity's secret nuclear defence succeeds... but it condemns a coastal town to sixty-five years of perpetual rain. Sixty-five years later, an elderly man returns to Brixham to prove what really happened that night. The deeper he digs into the conspiracy, the less he can trust the one person helping him uncover it: his own brother. A book about what the truth costs the person carrying it, and about a town that was written off in a room its residents were never told about. Complete manuscript. Not currently represented. --- ## The Silent Ascent ![The Silent Ascent cover concept](/assets/images/fiction/the-silent-ascent.png "book-cover") Novel · Literary science fiction · Uganda, low Earth orbit, and the Moon, 1984 A shadow consortium called The Chrysalis Group has been running a private space programme for forty years, hidden from both Cold War superpowers. Elena Vance, nineteen and a geology prodigy, is recruited to take her missing father's place on a three-month rotation at a secret lunar colony. The mining operation is a front. Chrysalis is building a mass driver to deflect an asteroid... and the Soviet Union has detected the heat signature and read it as an American weapon. Cassette futurism: 1984 as it was actually built, in ferrite core and telex and hand-ground optics. Manuscript in development, close to complete. --- ## Red Dust ![Red Dust cover concept](/assets/images/fiction/red-dust.png "book-cover") Novel · Literary science fiction · Jezero City, Mars, 2026 Kitty Rehn, seventeen, arrives on Mars to work the mineral fields and outrun the grief of her mother's death in a rover crash back on Earth. She finds a colony run like a company town, where the only freedom is an illegal racing circuit across the wastelands. When she finds evidence that the mining is destabilising the colony's own geology, the circuit becomes the only communication network outside corporate surveillance. Standalone, set in the same universe as *The Silent Ascent*, forty-two years later. In development. --- ## On the engineering The day job is safety-critical systems, so I am not guessing at this. When a spacecraft in one of these books vents, it vents for a reason I can defend. When a safety case gets signed, the meeting reads like meetings I have sat in. That is not about quality... it is about a texture that is hard to fake, and getting harder to find: how consequential decisions actually get made, by tired people, with incomplete information, on a date somebody already promised a customer. --- ## Enquiries For representation, rights, or editorial enquiries about any of the above, [get in touch](/contact). --- ## Future Tense — A Z Mackay URL: https://azmackay.com/future-tense The future doesn't arrive all at once. It leaks. A new app changes how we talk to each other. An algorithm starts choosing what we want before we know we want it. A breakthrough in longevity research makes death feel negotiable. By the time these shifts reach the headlines they have already rewired something fundamental in us. Future Tense is where I track those leaks... the moment a technology stops being a tool and starts being a condition of life. An essay most weeks, on a Wednesday, on patterns most people will not see for another six months. It is not tech journalism. It is pattern recognition from someone who spent decades building the systems and then started asking the wrong questions. The essays are the field notes. The novels are what I do with them. [Read Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com) --- ## Five ways in More than two hundred essays are in the archive as at July 2026, which is not a useful place to start. These are the ones I would hand someone first. **The Cloud Above the Clouds** On the proposal to move data centres into orbit, and what it means to put the machines somewhere we cannot reach them. **The Aquifer and the Algorithm** Compute has a water footprint, and it lands on specific places with specific water tables. What the environmental cost of intelligence actually looks like on the ground. **The Salesperson in Your Head** What happens to persuasion when the persuader knows you better than your friends do, is infinitely patient, and never leaves the room. **Parasocial: Word of the Year for a Lonely Species** On one-directional intimacy, and a culture that has started to prefer it. **The Safety Theatre of Agentic AI** Why the rituals we have invented to make autonomous systems feel controlled are mostly for our benefit rather than theirs. --- ## By preoccupation The archive is easier to navigate by what you are curious about than by date. **Machines and autonomy** — agents, evaluation, the commodification of models, and the widening gap between what a system does and what anyone can account for. ![Two process tracks diverging, one continuous and one broken](/assets/images/essays/machines.png "strip") **Orbit and the space economy** — launch, debris, the industrialisation of low Earth orbit, and the strange new geography of putting infrastructure where nobody lives. ![Three concentric orbits with a single body on the outermost](/assets/images/essays/orbit.png "strip") **Earth systems and resource** — water, sand, energy, extraction. The physical bill for the immaterial economy. ![A section through four geological strata](/assets/images/essays/resource.png "strip") **Bodies and biology** — synthetic biology, protein folding, the clinic, and biology's slow conversion into an engineering discipline. ![A protein backbone folded into a single resolved knot](/assets/images/essays/bodies.png "strip") **Attention, work and the self** — hiring, persuasion, loneliness, competence, and what it does to a person to work alongside something that never tires. ![A field of identical marks with one turned to face a different direction](/assets/images/essays/attention.png "strip") --- ## Reading it Essays go out to subscribers. A selection is open to everyone... the full archive, the monthly deep briefings and the member discussions are for paid subscribers, which is what keeps the writing independent of anyone who might prefer a softer version of it. That independence does real work. Future Tense takes no sponsorship, carries no institutional affiliation, and is edited by nobody but me. It is the one part of my working life where no one gets to ask for a change of emphasis. --- ## Fair warning I am not interested in breathless AI hype, simplistic doomerism, ten-ways-tech-will-change-your-life listicles, or pretending technology is neutral. I write about humans. The tech is just what reveals us. If you want someone to tell you everything is going to be fine, this is not it. If you want someone to tell you everything is going to collapse, this is not it either. I write about what is actually happening, which is usually stranger and more interesting than either story. [Read Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com) [The fiction](/fiction) --- ## About — A Z Mackay URL: https://azmackay.com/about ![A Z Mackay](/assets/images/identity/portrait.jpg "plate") 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). --- ## Contact — A Z Mackay URL: https://azmackay.com/contact [adam@adammackay.com](mailto:adam@adammackay.com) One address covers both names. A short email gets a faster answer than a long one, and I would rather exchange two paragraphs than book a call. --- ## What I am glad to hear about **Representation and rights.** *Beneath a Serpent Sky* is a finished manuscript and is not currently represented. Happy to send a synopsis, the opening chapters, or the whole thing. **Festivals, events and panels.** Particularly anything where the science and the fiction are allowed to argue with each other in public. **Editorial commissions.** Essays and reported features on technology and the people it lands on. Recent work has appeared in [heise iX](https://www.heise.de/ix/) and [HiPEAC](https://www.hipeac.net) under the other name. **Anything in Future Tense you think is wrong.** Corrections get made on the record, and a good counterexample is worth more to me than agreement. --- ## Elsewhere - **[Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com)** — the essays - **[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/azmackay.bsky.social)** — @azmackay.bsky.social - **[X](https://x.com/azmackay)** — @azmackay - **[adammackay.com](https://adammackay.com)** — technical, advisory and conference enquiries