Hi, I’m James B Wood.
A British author who writes about technology, bureaucracy, family life, Scouting and the many ingenious ways human beings can turn perfectly sensible ideas into administrative disasters.
My current fiction series, Red Tape & Ruin, combines near-future technology thrillers with distinctly British satire.
The first book, Project Radiant, looks at what happens when artificial intelligence becomes entangled with government, corporate ambition, political convenience and people who are absolutely certain that the dashboard says everything is fine.
Its follow-up, Lifetime Subscription, starts with something rather less dramatic.
A kettle.
More specifically, a £24.99 smart kettle that suddenly refuses to boil water properly unless its owner pays a monthly subscription to unlock the Full Boil Feature.
From there, things deteriorate. Quite quickly…
Technology, bureaucracy and where the fiction comes from
None of this has come entirely from nowhere.
I’ve spent nearly three decades working in technology.
Over the years I’ve worked across software engineering, digital delivery, DevOps, reliability, cloud platforms, product delivery and Product Operations.
That means I have spent an unreasonable amount of my adult life discussing platforms, roadmaps, resilience, governance, transformation programmes, strategic priorities and things described as “temporary workarounds” that subsequently celebrated their tenth birthdays.
I’ve seen genuinely brilliant technology solve difficult problems.
I’ve also watched organisations take relatively simple problems, add several layers of governance, three steering committees, a transformation programme and a PowerPoint deck, then wonder why everything has become slightly more complicated.
Unsurprisingly, some of that has found its way into my fiction.
The technology in Red Tape & Ruin matters, but the books aren’t really about machines becoming evil.
They’re about people. People building systems, buying systems and depending on systems.
People making perfectly rational decisions within their own little part of an organisation and occasionally producing something collectively absurd.
Which, in my experience, is often far more interesting and more common than a computer simply deciding to take over the world.
Red Tape & Ruin
The idea behind the series is fairly simple: What happens when increasingly powerful technology meets government bureaucracy, commercial pressure and human nature?
In Project Radiant, investigative technology journalist Sarah Perriam begins digging into the government’s use of artificial intelligence and discovers rather more than anybody intended her to.
In Lifetime Subscription, the question changes. It isn’t simply about what AI can do, it is about who owns it.
And what happens when governments, businesses and ordinary people become dependent on technology they no longer properly control.
There are sovereign AI systems, subscription appliances, surveillance, corporate politics, whistleblowers, product teams, government committees, inconvenient journalists and rather a lot of language designed to make terrible ideas sound reassuring.
So essentially, technology.
Writing before Red Tape & Ruin
I’ve been writing and publishing books since 2020, although the subjects have wandered around somewhat.
Dinosaurs, Elves and Imps is a collection of children’s stories, written for my kids years ago and put into the world for no other reason than to say I had published a book.
Ascot to Argelès follows our family road trips through France and the particular form of optimism required to put children, luggage and camping equipment into a car and drive south for 850 miles.
Tales from the Halfdeck draws on the log of a young indentured midshipman, who happens to be my father, sailing with the Blue Funnel Line in the early 1960s.
And It’s Only an Hour a Week is about volunteering in Scouting and the rather optimistic phrase often used to persuade unsuspecting adults that becoming a Scout leader won’t consume much of their spare time.
It does, obviously. But it is worth your time.
Scouting
Scouting has been part of my life for a very long time. I was a Scout when I was younger and have now spent more than twenty years as a Scout leader. Being responsible for groups of young people around tents, axes, cooking equipment and open fires has taught me many useful things about leadership, teamwork and risk management.
It has also provided a healthy appreciation for absurdity. When you have spent enough evenings trying to persuade a group of Scouts that pouring more lighter fluid onto something is not technically a fire-lighting strategy, you develop a particular outlook on life.
That outlook tends to appear in my writing.
Scouting eventually led to It’s Only an Hour a Week, which attempts to capture both the ridiculousness and the genuine joy of volunteering.
Despite the title, it should probably be made clear that nobody has ever identified which particular hour of the week the phrase refers to.
Why satire?
Because reality keeps providing material. I enjoy thrillers, technology, politics, science fiction and stories about people confronting systems much larger than themselves. But I also find it difficult to write about bureaucracy and technology without finding the humour in it.
Somewhere there is always an acronym nobody can explain. A meeting that could have been an email or a system telling you that the problem you are experiencing is actually a feature, or somebody announcing that a catastrophic failure represents an exciting opportunity for learning.
Satire lets me explore genuinely serious questions without pretending that human beings stop being ridiculous simply because the stakes become important.
If Red Tape & Ruin occasionally feels uncomfortably plausible, that is entirely intentional.
Although I’d prefer some parts to remain fiction. Particularly the kettle.
Away from the keyboard
Away from writing and technology, I’m a father of three, husband to a very understanding wife, Scout leader and member of a household containing several cats who appear to regard the rest of us as support staff.
I was born in London, grew up in the southeast of England and have spent much of my working life travelling into and around London.
I enjoy travel, history, the slightly stranger corners of Britain, cooking over open fires and discovering places that probably seemed like a much better idea before everyone got into the car.
I also remain firmly convinced that most situations can be improved by a good cup of tea. Preferably one made with water that has actually reached 100°C.
Start here
If you’re new to my books, Project Radiant is the best place to start with Red Tape & Ruin.
You can also explore my other books, read the latest posts about writing, technology and the occasionally bewildering business of being an author, or join my ARC team to read upcoming books before publication.
Thanks for stopping by.
And if your kettle ever starts asking for your credit card details, please let me know.
I’m collecting evidence…
