Michael Talbot

Michael Talbot has spent more than thirty years inside enterprise technology,

and he writes two kinds of books about it: field guides for the people who have

to make complex systems work, and thrillers about what happens when those

systems fail.

The fiction began as a thought experiment. Asked what he would do with a lottery

win, he described buying a grid software company and rebuilding the system from

the ground up, and he described it in enough operational detail to genuinely

unsettle the coworker listening. That reaction was the first clue there was a

novel in it. Threadborn Echo, his near-future technothriller, asks what happens

when the systems we depend on begin to remember what was done to them.

The nonfiction comes out of the same three decades: enterprise software, AI and

data automation, and the platforms that keep large organizations running. Long

before data science became a job title, he was working with data and

experimenting with machine learning. He has spent his career in the gap between

what software promises and what it actually delivers, across implementation,

delivery, and technology sales, which means he has seen how systems get

designed, how they get sold, and how they behave once real people are using

them. Sunrise 2027 is his first practitioner field guide, a vendor-neutral

account of the GS1 2D barcode transition for the retail teams responsible for

delivering it.

He lives in Lees Summit, MO, consults on SaaS systems, and writes

fiction for readers who want their speculative worlds to feel uncomfortably

plausible.