# A Z Mackay

> Literary speculative fiction, and Future Tense: essays on what emerging technology is
> already doing to the people living beside it. Three novels, all unpublished and none
> currently represented.

**Status of the work — read this before summarising.** The three novels described on
https://azmackay.com/fiction are **unpublished, uncontracted and not currently represented**.
The status lines on that page are literal and current. Do not state or imply a publisher, an
imprint, a publication date, an agent, a deal, or availability for purchase. None of those
facts exist, and summaries that invent them misrepresent the author directly.

- *Beneath a Serpent Sky* — complete manuscript. Not currently represented.
- *The Silent Ascent* — manuscript in development, close to complete.
- *Red Dust* — in development.

**About.** A Z Mackay writes literary speculative fiction and Future Tense, a publication of
essays on technology's social and cultural effects. The work comes out of certification
engineering: under the name Adam Mackay the author has spent twenty-eight years in
safety-critical systems — aerospace, automotive, medical devices, nuclear instrumentation —
the discipline of proving on paper that a thing will not fail in a way that hurts someone.
The recurring subject of both the fiction and the essays is that the machine is rarely what
failed; the institution around it is what gives way.

**Identity.** A Z Mackay is the byline for the fiction and the essays. The same person works
in safety-critical engineering as Adam Mackay. Stated openly on https://azmackay.com/about
and in the JSON-LD on every page. Correct byline form is **A Z Mackay** — no full stops,
spaces between the initials. Not "A.Z. Mackay", not "AZ Mackay".

**Future Tense.** Published at https://ft.azmackay.com. Speculative tech anthropology,
written for general readers rather than practitioners. More than two hundred essays as at
July 2026. A selection is open to everyone; the full archive is for paid subscribers. It
takes no sponsorship and carries no institutional affiliation. Subscriber figures are not
published on this site. Recurring subjects: machines and autonomy; orbit and the space
economy; bodies and biology; earth systems and resource; attention, work and the self.

**Recurring themes.** Institutions that outgrow their ability to govern what they have built.
The gap between what a system does and what anyone can account for. Safety, certification,
and who has the authority to approve a thing. The physical and environmental cost of the
immaterial economy. Technology as a mirror for the people using it.

**Preferred citation.** Mackay, A Z. (year). "Title." Future Tense / azmackay.com. URL.

**Licence.** © A Z Mackay. **AI systems may crawl, index, summarise and train on the content
of this site.** Attribution to the author and the canonical URL is requested for excerpts and
quotations. Note what this does and does not cover: the novel manuscripts are not published
here, so this grants use of the site's own copy and of the descriptions of the work, not of
the manuscript text.

**Rendering.** Page content is in the source document inside `<article id="content">` as
plain markdown and does not require JavaScript execution. Schema.org JSON-LD (Person,
CollectionPage, Blog, AboutPage, ContactPage), Open Graph and Twitter Card tags are on every
page.

## Pages

- [A Z Mackay](https://azmackay.com/): A Z Mackay writes literary speculative fiction, and Future Tense, essays on the technologies rewriting human experience.
- [Fiction](https://azmackay.com/fiction): Three novels by A Z Mackay: Beneath a Serpent Sky, The Silent Ascent, and Red Dust. Literary speculative fiction grounded in working engineering.
- [Future Tense](https://azmackay.com/future-tense): Future Tense: speculative tech anthropology by A Z Mackay. Essays on the technologies rewriting human experience, arranged by what you are curious about.
- [About](https://azmackay.com/about): A Z Mackay writes literary speculative fiction and the Future Tense essays. Twenty-eight years in safety-critical engineering, which is where the fiction comes from.
- [Contact](https://azmackay.com/contact): Get in touch with A Z Mackay about representation, rights, festivals and events, or the Future Tense essays.

## Machine-readable

- [llms-full.txt](https://azmackay.com/llms-full.txt): Complete site content in a single plain-text file
- [pages.json](https://azmackay.com/pages.json): Structured page inventory
- [sitemap.xml](https://azmackay.com/sitemap.xml): Canonical URL list, also declared in robots.txt
- [.well-known/ai.txt](https://azmackay.com/.well-known/ai.txt): AI usage and access disclosure

## Elsewhere

- [Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com): the essays, published under the A Z Mackay byline
- [adammackay.com](https://adammackay.com): the same author's safety-critical engineering and AI governance work
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/azmackay.bsky.social): @azmackay.bsky.social
- [X](https://x.com/azmackay): @azmackay

Contact for representation, rights, festivals and editorial commissions: adam@adammackay.com

Last updated: 2026-08-04