Tom DeMarco is the author of fifteen books, including novels, business books and a collection of short stories. He began his career as a software engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, working on what was then the world’s largest computer. His focus began early to turn toward writing, with stops along the way in software methods, organizational design, litigation consulting, and even a stint teaching undergraduate Ethics at the University of Maine. His most recent work is “The One-Way Time Traveler,” a romance in the form of a speculative novel. Prior to that he wrote two sci-fi novels, “A Ruby Beam of Light” and “Airship Nation,” which together make up part of his series Dark World Chronicles.
The One-Way Time Traveler
by Tom DeMarco
Genre: Romance
Welcome to the future. Women are in control. Of everything.
American astronaut John Donegal makes a desperate decision: with his damaged orbiter spinning away from the earth he floods its cabin with liquid nitrogen from the reserve air supply to freeze himself in the hopes of eventual rescue when next passing near the earth, decades or even centuries in the future.
When he is awakened, Donegal finds himself in what is surely a hospital, but seems more like a lavish manor house. He is in the care of two doctors and two nurses, all women. He seems to have been gone for something more than three hundred years. The patriarchy of his past has been replaced by a powerful and determined matriarchy.
The male of the species still has a role to play, that will always be true. But he has to play that role according to “the rules.” One of the rules involves a male humiliation ritual that he will have to undergo. Welcome to the future.
Readers 18+
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A Ruby Beam of Light (Dark World Chronicles Book 1)
by Tom DeMarco
Genre: Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy
FREE for a limited time
The world has gone dark. Nothing works. Cars and trucks and airplanes and guns and bombs are nothing more than paperweights. A mysterious disturbance propagated onto the earth’s magnetic field has the effect of inhibiting all explosions. It has repealed most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, leaving the world as it was in your great great grandparents’ time.
The villain (or hero, depending on your perspective) who has made this happen is the physicist Homer Layton. He must be destroyed. And his stupid machine that injects the disturbance must be destroyed. Because as long as it is running there can never be another real war. That is unacceptable. Fortunes of treasure and innovation have been invested in war materiel, all of it now useless. Most people would like to have their cars and computers and televisions working again, but that’s not what really matters. What really matters is that governments cannot get on with the business of war. The power elites around the world have determined to track down Layton and his little colony of war opponents and smash them. Then the nuclear war that that was just about to happen when he turned on his damnable machine can finally get started…
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Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)
by Tom DeMarco
Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy
The world has gone dark. Nothing works. Cars and trucks and airplanes and guns and bombs are nothing more than paperweights. A mysterious disturbance propagated onto the earth’s magnetic field has the effect of inhibiting all explosions. It has repealed most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, leaving the world as it was in your great great grandparents’ time.
The villain (or hero, depending on your perspective) who has made this happen is the physicist Homer Layton. He must be destroyed. And his stupid machine that injects the disturbance must be destroyed. Because without it we can never have another real war. This is unacceptable. Fortunes of treasure and innovation have been invested in war materiel, all of it now useless. Most people would like to have their cars and computers and televisions working again, but that’s not what really matters. What really matters is that governments cannot get on with the business of war. The power elites around the world have determined to track down Layton and his little colony of war opponents and smash them. Then the nuclear war that was just about to happen when he turned on his damnable machine can finally get started…
And now Volume Two:
Homer Layton’s young protégé, Loren Martine, is charged with the defense of the Baracoa colony and preservation of the Layton Effect transmitter that has made the world go dark. He knows an attack is imminent, that the colony’s success in defeating the earlier attack will not be so easily repeated. The shadowy Rupert Paule in Washington is determined to pulverize them. His forces will come again, under sail, and Loren’s few sailing vessels will have to be quick to repel them. He sets out to invent a more effective keel to make his boats sail higher and faster. The invention he comes up with is staggering: a variation of the Layton Effect causes a drastic local slowing of the flow of time in one dimension, so a keel which is free to move forward and back and up and down is effectively locked in its plane from side to side. His sailing craft will not slip to windward and they won’t heal over in the wind. To his utter astonishment, he discovers that the keel also works when turned on its side. It is falling, but so slowly as not to be noticed due locally modified time in the vertical dimension. The vertical keel floats in the air like a skyhook. He and his colleagues set out to use the new technology to fashion a fleet of airships. The airships are propelled by wind and held aloft by Layton Effect transmitters. What this changes is only everything. Let the enemy come in their ridiculous old-fashioned ships. Loren will defeat them from above.
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Dark Harbor House
by Tom Demarco
Genre: Historical Fiction
Bring together a wonderfully varied mix of characters in a once-grand Maine island summer cottage, leave them to their own devices over the course of a long, idyllic summer in the late 1940s, and you have all the ingredients for a fine comedy of manners. Author Tom DeMarco starts with a simple little love story, weaves in tantalizing details of the old mansion’s not totally respectable history, and adds a hint of gentle satire to create a novel that is touching, memorable, and deliciously entertaining.
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The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management
by Tom DeMarco
Genre: Computers & Technology | Foreign Languages
From prolific and influential consultant and author Tom DeMarco comes a project management novel that vividly illustrates the principles — and outright absurdities — that affect the productivity of a software development team.
With his trademark wit set free in the novel format, DeMarco centers the plot around the development of six software projects. Mr. Tompkins, a manager downsized from a giant telecommunications company, divides the huge staff of developers at his disposal into eighteen teams — three for each of the software products to be built. The teams are of different sizes and use different methods, and they compete against one another and against an impossible deadline.
Managing these teams — with the help of numerous consultants who come to his aid — Mr. Tompkins tests the project management principles he has gathered over a lifetime. Each chapter closes with journal entries that make up the core of the eye-opening approach to management illustrated in this engaging novel.
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