Crazy Mali

The world's capital is now Istanbul. The throne is held by Daniel Hayes - founder of Macrosys, the single corporation that runs the chip in your head, the chair that grows from the floor, the water in your pipes.

Mali is one of his two sons.

A boy raised on a janissary's curriculum - Ottoman histories the corporation tried to erase, a curved sword nobody his age can recognize, a code five centuries out of date - Mali is the only person on his street who could not pass for the year he was born in. His brother Sokol was raised on different chronicles, and reads them differently.

At thirteen, Mali was lifted from his father's pool by people Macrosys had stopped looking for. He grew up in the wild zones, among the Roma who had outlived three previous empires and were patient for the fourth. Now twenty-four, in love with a woman whose real name his brother does not know, quietly preparing the rebellion that will take Topkapı back, Mali rides toward the only city he was ever born in.

His brother Sokol started counting on the day they were taken. He has not stopped.

Crazy Mali is the opening volume of The Janissary, a series of literary cyberpunk novels in which the same five-hundred-year-old code is carried forward by a different warrior in each book. A janissary can be killed. A janissary can grow old. The corps endures.

Inside:

• A near-future Istanbul where almost nothing modern is permanent - chairs grow beneath you, ferries dissolve at midnight, Compliance officers lose their weapons when the water is fouled
• The Ottoman discipline of fratricide, weighed and applied
• A book designed to be read twice: the first read carries the wound, the second read reveals the machinery underneath
• An infant, a grandfather, and a long road east