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Rolf Obermaier

Author

  • Rolf Obermaier is the author of hard science fiction, historical fiction, and nonfiction unified by a sustained interest in power and its mechanisms, reason and its limits, memory and the cost of ignoring it, and the conditions under which political, technological, commercial, and human systems fail.

    His science fiction series begins with Navarchus and continues in Oneiroi. These novels engage seriously with speculative physics, including Lorentzian waveguides, relativistic travel, and the nature of non-biological intelligence, while remaining grounded in questions of identity, consciousness, and the price of discovery. They are hard science fiction in method and literary fiction in ambition.

    The Second Notebook, his first work of historical fiction, is set in the Grand Prix world of 1930s Europe. It follows a British journalist who moves through the circles of Mercedes and Auto Union as both observer and intelligence asset, then spends the next sixteen years reckoning with what he witnessed, what he understood, and what he chose to report. The novel examines complicity, conscience, and the slow arithmetic of moral debt.

    His nonfiction includes Open Systems – Closed Minds, a collection of essays on technology, freedom, and the democratic, scientific, and educational institutions open societies require in order to remain open, and The Arsonist’s Bucket, a historical and ethical examination of ideology, belief, and civilizational failure.

    With Broken Handoffs, Obermaier turns that same concern toward the commercial organization. Drawing from years inside sales, purchasing, supply chain, logistics, sourcing, vendor negotiation, inventory planning, and multi-warehouse distribution, he examines how competent people working inside disconnected systems produce avoidable financial loss, distorted accountability, and institutional blindness. The book argues that commercial dysfunction is rarely a failure of effort. More often, it is the predictable result of broken information handoffs, hidden cost structures, misaligned incentives, and decisions made before the people responsible for execution are allowed to see the truth.

    More of his work is available at amazon.com/author/rolfobermaier.