Houston, We Have a Problem: A Fictional Postmortem of a Very Real Tech Culture

A novel about outages, war rooms, and the people who break — long before the systems do.

A few weeks ago, I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time — I published my first novel.

It’s called Houston, We Have a Problem, and at its core, it’s about a software team caught in a production outage. But really, it’s about everything that happens around the outage — the egos, the escalations, the miscommunications, and the quiet breakdown of trust that no monitoring system will ever alert you to.

If you’ve ever been in a war room, this book may feel like a flashback.

If you haven’t — congratulations. This is your safe reading-distance glimpse into how things fall apart behind the scenes.

Why Fiction?

Because sometimes, fiction is the only way to tell the truth.

In the real world, we drown in postmortems that say all the right things.

In fiction, we can say the wrong things, the unspoken things- the real things.

This book is a satirical take on the dysfunctions that live under the surface of many modern tech teams: heroism over prevention, chaos over clarity, visibility over value.

It’s full of sarcasm, emotional contradictions, and painfully familiar behavior patterns.

It’s also funny. At least I hope it is.

The Setup

A critical production issue hits.

A cross-functional team is assembled.

Everyone’s present, but no one’s really there.

The pressure builds.

People unravel faster than the system does.

Houston, We Have a Problem isn’t about solving the incident. It’s about surviving it — emotionally, politically, organizationally.

It’s fiction, but you’ll probably recognize a few archetypes:

• The heroic developer who’s addicted to firefighting
• The VP who says a lot but understands very little
• The quiet engineer who actually knows what’s going on
• The metrics that look fine… until they don’t

Who It’s For

This book is for:

• Developers who’ve lived through chaotic on-calls
• PMs who’ve seen comms spin faster than resolution
• Leaders trying to decode the human cost of uptime
• Anyone who’s ever heard “we’ll fix it in the next sprint” and laughed

Where to Get It

The paperback is available in:

• India via Amazon.in and Notion Press
• Globally via Amazon in your region

Closing Thoughts

This book won’t teach you how to write better code.

It might teach you something about the people who do.

If you read it — thank you. If you review it — even better.

And if you see yourself in it — well, you’re not alone.

Houston, We Have a Problem is fiction.

The dysfunction it describes? Very real.