The Ken Swayne Catalogue

Seven Novels and the TV Series.
One Argument

Not a series with shared characters. Seven published novels and the television series treatment, each examining the same question — what do institutions do with knowledge that threatens them? — escalating in moral consequence with each work.

Read in This Order

The Leonardo Codex Thrillers

Four novels, one continuous argument about inherited knowledge and who gets to control it.

Standalone

Standalone Novels

Not connected to the Leonardo Codex universe — each makes its own case.

Political Fiction

The argument at full scale.

Institutional capture, not of a watchlist, but of the presidency itself.

50Years in technology
22Years in Australia
07Published novels
04Leonardo Codex · Books in series

What the Books are Saying Together

The question at the centre of every novel.

The progression is not from evil to more evil. It is from visible culpability to invisible mechanism. The Leonardo Codex Thrillers have identifiable villains. Unchanged has a retired civil servant who understood what he was doing and a system that simply continues without him.

Every mathematical system that claims to describe the world also claims the right to define what the world contains. …and what it does not contain disappears.

Inherited identity

Elena Voss inherits a destiny encoded in her DNA. Seren Pryce inherits a risk classification encoded in her heritage data. Rowan Marchant inherits a career, and eventually a weapon, built out of her own research without her consent. Julian Holt inherits a presidency out of a flagged file a platform sat on for three years. Four inheritances, four mechanisms, the same warning underneath each one.

The Panel Two argument

A device from The Edge Protocol: the error is never in Panel One. The error is in Panel Two, when the list survives. In Unchanged the list has been running for fifty years. In Minority Rule, it survives buried in Section Nine of the very document written to stop it.

The beauty of the render

Leonardo encoded knowledge in geometric forms so beautiful they were preserved for five centuries. The beauty produced deference. The deference produced silence.

Mathematics as the spine

Running beneath all six novels: the relationship between mathematical systems and institutional power. Each novel shows mathematics being used to do something to the world.

If you arrived via Unchanged

Recommended reading order.

1

Minority Rule

The closest thematic companion, and the only one that reaches the same institutional scale. The Panel Two argument, at full novel length.

2

The Edge Protocol

The Panel Two argument is the connective tissue.

3

The Reluctant Codex

The inherited identity mirror between Elena Voss and Seren Pryce. Same mechanism, opposite moral direction.

4

The 1510 Superposition

Start of the LCT series. The mathematical thread is clearest here.

5

The Instinct Directive

The same inherited-identity mechanism, told through biology rather than data.

Unchanged — Series Treatment & Manuscript Request