Dark Texas
A near-future thriller about the winter the Texas grid goes dark — the first novel from computer scientist Charles Petrie.
Anyone who lived through February 2021 in Texas remembers the cold that would not quit and the lights that did. Charles Petrie has turned that memory into fiction. Dark Texas is a near-future thriller in which a catastrophic winter storm takes down the state's power grid and does not give it back, and the story follows four ordinary Texans as the outage stops being an inconvenience and starts being a question of survival.
The premise
The grid fails, then keeps failing, and the systems everyone quietly depends on go with it. Mac, a retired teacher who saw something like this coming; Laurie, a yoga instructor who prepared for it; Jake, a father newly widowed and out of his depth; and Chas, a power-company analyst who understands exactly how bad it can get. Their four paths run through a cascading collapse that Petrie, an engineer by training, makes feel less like a disaster movie and more like a plausible Tuesday.
Early praise
- “Terrifyingly plausible. Terrifically entertaining.” — Frances Silversmith, writer and software engineer
- “A chilling reminder of civility's dependence on fragile foundations.” — Georg Rute, CEO, Gridraven
- “A sobering and necessary read.” — Meredith Angwin, author of Shorting the Grid
Dark Texas is published by Stoney Creek Publishing in partnership with Texas A&M Press (February 10, 2026; 314 pages; paperback and ebook).
Find the book at Stoney Creek Publishing →
Charles Petrie is a Stanford computer scientist and the founding editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing. Dark Texas is his first novel. His life and work are celebrated at charlespetrie.com.