David Pesta writes grounded, gritty dystopias about the systems that keep a society running, and what happens when those systems are turned against the people who depend on them.

He is a structural engineer in Calgary, which is where the books get their machinery: municipal regulation, structural failure, and the long arithmetic of deferred maintenance. But the engine is simpler than that. He has two small children who will inherit a set of public goods they never voted for and cannot remember being built, and who will keep only what nobody sells while they are growing up.

His debut novel, Assurance, opens The Cineris Cycle, set in a city divided by ruthless, data-driven systems. More of that city is being written.

Assurance was written in the margins of a full-time job and a young family. When he is not drafting manuscripts, coordinating projects, or cycle commuting across the city, he is a relentless DIYer: designing and fabricating custom audio equipment, working through a long list of renovations, and navigating the joys of plant-based cooking. He lives, writes, and builds in Calgary, Alberta, with his wife and their two young boys.