Jean-Marc Strauven

Jean-Marc Strauven has worked in software for over twenty years. Long enough to have watched three or four definitive revolutions go by, and to have taken up the habit of checking the dates.

He writes two kinds of books. Essays, in which twelve myths, twelve clauses or twelve technologies are put to the test with dated facts to hand: artificial intelligence, the digital contract nobody reads, the technologies we judge before we examine them.

And crime novels, set in Forest, the Brussels district where his grandfather was a neighbourhood policeman. Joseph Vermeiren knows eleven hundred people by name — it is the only thing he can do, and it is what lets him see what the registers erase. The streets, the laws and the dates are verified; the characters are not: none of them ever existed. (Available in French only for now.)