I was born in Toronto, Canada and grew up in the UK in Glasgow (all right, it was actually Bearsden). I studied Aeronautical Engineering at university. My working life began in R&D making power plants more efficient and Allison-engined racing boats faster. After getting sick of being an engineer in Thatcher's rent-seeking Britain, I gained an MBA at the London Business School and progressed to a rather more prosperous career in Switzerland, Germany and Sweden, latterly as a senior marketing executive for ABB Power Generation. I returned to Scotland in 1995, where I have worked as a consulting engineer in the gas and process industries.

Engineering demands a fine command of language. If you are describing how a complex industrial plant works, and you confuse people with poor writing, it's not just irritating, it's potentially dangerous.

Apocalypse and dystopia are my favoured genres as an author. Humanity is confronted by trends that cannot go on, yet for which there exist no political mechanisms to reverse peacefully. Our planet is being de-wilded and polluted as I write, yet “middle class affluence” has reached hardly more than one tenth of the global population. Does anyone believe our planet can support ten times more affluence?
As the old adage goes, if something cannot go on, then it will eventually stop.
In my fiction, I explore the possible “stops”, and what comes after.