Fewer bugs. Mostly.

I write science fiction about systems. This is not a coincidence, given that my day job is also about systems: I'm a junior developer at a Wellington tech company, mostly backend work, a lot of API integration. I like figuring out where two components misunderstand each other. The SF I read growing up was Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin and Greg Egan, the kind that takes the mechanics of its imagined world seriously. My current project is a hard-SF short story collection in which each story is about a different failure mode of a near-future technology. Not a disaster in the dramatic sense. A failure mode: the way a system produces an outcome that is technically correct and morally ambiguous. I find this endlessly interesting. My friends find my plot summaries confusing. I'm in Wellington permanently now, in a flat in Newtown. The city is small enough that you run into the same writers at different events, which is either community or limited options, depending on how you look at it. I've been to a few readings at a bookshop called Unity Books on Willis Street and that's the closest I've come to a writing community. Which is fine. I don't think I need community as much as I need time, and the time I have is Friday evenings and alternate Sunday mornings.