The warning was always there.
Ken Swayne grew up on the Alderley Edge escarpment. He spent fifty years at the frontier of emerging technology across four continents. He was present at the Manila Hotel during the 1986 coup attempt. He has been writing about hidden systems ever since.




From consolable to irresolvable.
The moral stakes escalate in one direction only.
NEXUS — out now
NEXUS
Buy → Amazon Leonardo Codex Thrillers · Novel 01The Reluctant Codex
Buy → Amazon Leonardo Codex Thrillers · Novel 02The 1510 Superposition
Buy → Amazon Novel · Archaeological ThrillerThe Edge Protocol
Buy → Amazon TV Series Treatment · Political FictionUnchanged
Series Treatment →
About the Author
Ken Swayne grew up on the Alderley Edge escarpment in Cheshire — the landscape that runs through his fiction is not atmosphere, it is memory. He spent fifty years at the frontier of emerging technology: VR, AR, three-dimensional visualisation, twenty-two years in Western Australia, work that took him across four continents. He was present at the Manila Hotel during the 1986 coup attempt against the Aquino government — coordinating the evacuation of a large Australian contingent through service exits while armed rebels moved through the building. He returned to the United Kingdom in 1995 and began writing, in his early seventies, the books that fifty years of watching hidden systems produce.
The systems in these novels are real. The surveillance architecture is real. The institutional behaviour is real. The only thing that is fiction is the names.
A Project Within the Body of Work
A sequence of novels mapping the relationship between technology, governance, and power. From a Bronze Age chamber to contemporary surveillance infrastructure — five stages, a defined argument, and the question of which panel we are standing in right now. Not every novel in this catalogue belongs to this project. These are the ones that do.
TV Series Treatment — Political Fiction
A GCHQ analyst discovers a 1973 Cabinet Office programme classifying British citizens by genetic heritage. It never stopped. She is on the list. The algorithm didn’t inherit the prejudice — it rediscovered it from the data, because the data was always already the prejudice.
A complete six-part TV series treatment, freely available. The full manuscript — approximately 30,000 words — sent personally on request.
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