Tiamat's Nest - Tapa blanda

Weather forecasting is a life-or-death profession, and hard sciences and technology are all that keep people alive and fed. Anthropologists, soft and useless, rank slightly below politicians and telemarketers on the social scale. This sucks for Charles Hawthorne, Professor of Anthropology. Worse yet, his research into human behavior has discovered how human history ended up on its current miserable course, and the perpetrator is hell-bent on keeping it hidden. Worst of all, with everything mechanical under computer control, the most innocuous device is a potential murder weapon to a well-connected villain. After a series of deadly near-misses Charles flees to the wilds of Greenland where the global network has yet to reach. But to deal with the threat, to save himself and his family, Charles has to confront technology full on and enter the even more hostile world online. Freeing humanity from a lifetime of slavery comes as an added bonus.

Ian Bott is a science fiction writer who successfully evaded the writing bug until it bit him, late in life, by means of a sneak stealth attack. As a software developer he rebelled against mind-deadening software specifications and resolved to write technical documents fit for ordinary human consumption. From there, it was a small step to speculative fiction. He lives in beautiful British Columbia with his wife, two children, and a steadily expanding menagerie of pets.