FG-01
Published · Flagship
Stop Feeding the System
If the fight never finishes, it isn't a fight. It's a feeding schedule.
Author · Melbourne, Australia
Field guides for the systems people get trapped in. Novels for the ones they imagine.
Lee Powell writes two kinds of books. The nonfiction maps the rooms people live inside before they can see them: the closed-loop relationship, the life that runs without its owner. The fiction opens a door out of the world entirely, for a while.
The paint comes first. The books are what is left when it dries. See the work →
Wing one · Nonfiction
The Field Guides
Operating kits, not pep talks. Named tools, tested in the room, written from inside it.
Browse the field guides →Wing two · Fiction
The Novels
Speculative literary fiction. An intelligence audits humanity's archive. A new layer is being written.
Enter the fiction →Start here
Begin with the room you are in.
Nobody arrives at these books by accident. One of these sentences is usually the reason.
Room one
"The fight never finishes. I write the careful message, and the same machine starts again."
Your book isStop Feeding the System
Room two
"I built the life. Career, family, the whole structure. And I have gone missing inside it."
Your book isManOS
Room three
"I do not want a tool tonight. I want to leave the world and come back changed."
Your book isDAY NINE
The catalogue · Field guides
Operating systems, not pep talks.
Each field guide is built around named tools that work as a set. Read in Kindle or paperback through Amazon. The samples and templates arrive by email.
FG-02
Published
ManOS
For the capable man who built the life and knows achievement was never the answer.
The catalogue · Fiction
NV-01
Published
LOADED: An Archive
A post-human intelligence audits the archive of humanity from the bottom of the Pacific.
NV-02
Published
The God Protocol
Do not teach the machine to pray.
NV-03
Published
DAY NINE
The system has never been wrong. It has read the next nine days of his life. On the ninth, it says, he kills his daughter.
NV-04
In active drafting
The Witness Layer
He is the man they pay to make the dead talk. He does not yet know he is one of them.
The Field Notes
One letter, when there is something worth sending.
A tool from one of the books, a passage that survived the cull, word of a new edition. No schedule, no funnels, no noise. Every template, sample chapter and early excerpt on this site arrives through the same door.
Articles
Recent pieces from the field.
About the author
The map-maker stayed in the territory.
Lee Powell writes about the systems people find themselves inside before they can see them. He is the author of the field guides Stop Feeding the System and ManOS, and the novels LOADED: An Archive, The God Protocol and DAY NINE. His fourth novel, The Witness Layer, is in progress.
Before returning to books, he built document software used by writers worldwide, including Scrivener and Scapple for Windows, built IBM's first online retail platform, and delivered systems inside banks, exchanges and government agencies. He holds an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford. He lives in Melbourne, where he also paints; his work is held in private collections internationally.