// Author

Allen Schade

Historical nonfiction and science fiction, written by a hardware engineer who decided the most interesting machine was a story.

Allen Schade spent the better part of two decades building the machinery behind the internet. Across roughly fourteen years at Google he worked deep in the hardware — qualifying and deploying servers and storage at hyperscale, helping stand up next-generation datacenters, and spending two years in research and development on Google's virtual-reality team, designing the way people would reach into virtual worlds. He later led datacenter operations for a major game publisher, architecting the systems that keep millions of players online.

Then he got his hands into something slower. He founded Powell Artisan Bakery, a cottage micro-bakery devoted to real bread — long fermentation, live sourdough culture, stone-ground local grain — applying an engineer's precision to a craft that refuses to be rushed. The same instinct that asks how a thing actually works, applied to a loaf.

Writing is where those threads meet. His debut, The Price of Discovery, rebuilds nine real voyages from the Age of Exploration out of the explorers' own logs — and opened at #1 in its category. His science-fiction series The Iron Gardener turns that same curiosity loose on stranger worlds. He is also building games under the Studio Schade banner.

He lives in Powell, Ohio, with his wife and fellow author Rachel Schade, their son, and more half-finished projects than any reasonable person should attempt at once.