Shane Sturgeon

The road to hell is paved with optimisation algorithms.

The Net Zero Trilogy

Near-future New Zealand. A brilliant tech CEO creates synthetic workers to solve a humanitarian crisis—and watches her solution enable mass unemployment, surveillance states, and democratic collapse.

The Net Zero Trilogy follows Alex Walsh across two decades as her well-intentioned innovations are weaponised by the very systems she built them to help. It's a story about smart people whose solutions create worse problems than the ones they solve.

Control. Compromise. Consequence.

Literary science fiction for readers who enjoyed The Circle, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go. A cautionary tale about the gap between solving visible problems and the disasters we create in our blind spots.

About the author

Shane Sturgeon is a New Zealand author who spent much of his working life designing change and worrying about what it would actually do.

Before writing fiction, he worked for nearly twenty years across finance, IT, human resources, and governance roles, building systems, leading long-running programmes, and dealing with the practical and human consequences of decisions made with the best of intentions. That experience taught him that most problems don't come from malice, but from complexity, incentives, and ideas that behave differently once they leave the whiteboard.

The Net Zero Trilogy draws on those concerns, exploring how smart, ethical people can create outcomes none of them would choose outright.

He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.