Engineer as Hero: The Novels of Robert Byrne

Few novels capture the drama, the passion, and the excitement of engineering. To do justice to the subject, the author must be conversant with engineering science and practice. In addition, the author must write with sufficient power and clarity to make the relevant technical details clear to a non-technical audience without boring them. Robert Byrne is such an author. A civil engineer by training, he edited a trade journal in the heavy construction industry for many years before becoming a full-time writer. Here’s an excerpt from Skyscraper in which Castleman, the engineer responsible for certain design flaws in the eponymous structure, explains his profession:

“Doctors lose a patient now and then,” Castleman went on, “but an engineer can wipe out a hundred people in the wink of an eye. What’s worse, the responsibility never ends. In forty years, I’ve designed a lot of buildings. Every day they deteriorate a little, just like you and I do. People live in them and work in them and walk past them on the sidewalk. Their lives depends on me, a man they’ve never met and never think about. All my life I’ve had to worry about people getting killed because of something I might have overlooked. Some little error that made no difference when the structure was young and strong. “

That drama plays out in one form or another in many of Byrne’s novels. Better known for his works on Pool and Billiards, Byrne wrote five novels featuring engineers as the central character facing potentially disastrous circumstances:

• Thrill (1995): about a dangerous roller coaster.
• Mannequin (1988): about a runaway train leaking nerve gas.
• Skyscraper (1984): about a skyscraper in danger of structural failure.
• The Dam (1981): about a dam on the verge of collapse.
• The Tunnel (1977): about a terrorist attack on the English Channel tunnel.

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