Nicholas P. Leonerig floors, server rooms, and failures that followed the rules

Originally from the streets of Brooklyn, he now writes from rural New Mexico. For thirty-seven years he worked in the oilfield, most of it as a driller. For three decades he was also a computer consultant and network analyst. For ten years, he published a newspaper in print and online. These were not successive careers. They overlapped for years, and the writer came out of that intersection: machinery, information, people, and the consequences when any one of them fails.

His fiction is steeped in engineered environments: racks, panels, telemetry, procedures, and the quiet rooms we build when the noise becomes unbearable. It is written by someone who has stood on a rig floor where the distance between an ordinary tour and a fatality could be a single ignored instruction — and who has watched a monitoring dashboard glow green while something underneath it was quietly going wrong.

His books treat fate as engineering: redundant systems that still fail, instructions that outlive the people who wrote them, and care encoded into architecture only to be obeyed too literally. They are stories about grief as structure, engineering as character, and the moment a perfectly functioning system reaches the wrong human conclusion.

The fear lives in the gap between what the system can see and what the people inside it are actually asking for.

Published under the imprint A Fiendish Publishing Co.. The publishing record stays with the house, not on this page.