The fiction behind it
Sarah Perriam never stopped asking who the small print was for
Sarah Perriam is the fictional journalist at the centre of James B Wood’s Red Tape & Ruin series. She spends her time following paperwork, bills and the quiet bureaucracy that turns everyday life into a set of recurring obligations.
This publication takes its spirit from her. The subscriptions, cancellation mazes and direct debits documented here are real enough to annoy, and absurd enough to be worth reading about.
James B Wood
Techno-political thrillers
Stories about corporate systems, state bureaucracy and the technology that quietly decides what we are allowed to keep.
Red Tape & Ruin
The series
Follow fictional journalist Sarah Perriam through a world where paperwork has become a weapon and every form hides a further clause.
Techno-political fiction
Systems that anticipate
The novels imagine how recurring fees, locked-in platforms and automated enforcement grow out of ordinary administrative habit.
Dystopian satire
Dry, not doom
Each book keeps its scepticism sharp and its tone understated, treating the surveillance of daily life with wit rather than spectacle.
A note on the writing
Corporate systems, quietly in control
James B Wood writes about the way corporate bureaucracy and techno-political systems spill out of spreadsheets and terms of service into real homes. The subject is rarely a villain in a cape. It is a cancellation form, a renewal notice, a device that will not start until the account is current.
That is the reason the novels sit comfortably beside a publication about subscriptions. Both ask the same question: who actually benefits when ownership becomes a licence that must be renewed?