DAVID LINDSLEY
ENGINEER AND AUTHOR
My first textbook was Boiler Control Systems published by McGraw-Hill. Now out of print, the book can still be bought second hand. (And in case you are interested, I still have a few copies I could sell - just email me!) the second technical book that I wrote was Power Plant Control and Instrumentation (ISBN: 978-0852967652). It was published in 1999 by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (now the Institution of Engineering and Technology).
the books generally avoided getting to grips with actual systems hardware - which could be pneumatic, analogue electronic or computer-based - but describe the underlying principles which remain fundamentally unchanged. (I know that, over the past 20-30 years, developments like combined-cycle plant have emerged, and the second book does pick up on this fact.)
FICTION ... AND TEXTBOOKS TOO!
My first novel, Far Point, featured engineer Dan Foster investigating the cause of an explosion at a power station in China. His work uncovers corruption at the highest levels in Government. Oh, and on the way he falls in love!
The technical side and some of the characters were loosely based on actual incidents and people that I had encountered during my working life. I tried to build human interest into a story that revolved round pretty complex technical issues; who would have thought you could write a novel around pseudo-random binary signals, cross-correlators, transistor latch-up and the like! But when you read a book by Kathy Reichs, the intense technical - in her case forensic medical - detail are not intrusive. One reviewer of Far Point said it was “full of technical details, but written so that your eyes don’t glaze over”, so perhaps I succeeded.
I was over the moon when ‘Far Point’ won a £1,000 prize in the Engineering Media Awards competition in 2006!
My second novel, called The Darkfall Switch, has been published as a hardback by Hale Books. In it, good old Dan Foster gets to work investigating the cause of a massive power blackout that hits Southern England. He discovers that a young hacker in America has stumbled across a complex trigger with a sinister purpose. This time the action takes place in London, Connecticut and Colorado.
Coincidentally, the plot mirrors the incident that brought down an Iranian power station in 2010. The Stuxnet Trojan worked via a memory stick; in Darkfall the disasters are brought about via an external link. But in both cases the perpetrators are not simple hackers: they are government agencies!
My aim has always been to show the engineering profession as being exciting and rewarding, and that engineers are far from being dull geeks. In this book I have tried to get into the complex emotional issues that drive and motivate Dan Foster.
I have now published my third novel, BLIND TO DANGER. The story is set in India and involves Dan helping a lawyer whose career and life have been destroyed by a huge multi-national energy corporation which is trying to wriggle out of admitting responsibility for a serious accident. So it’s full circle: back to involvement with the law and lawyers and back to greed, corruption and financial people getting in the way of engineering! What fun!
DAVID LINDSLEY
ENGINEER AND AUTHOR