A Pilgrimage Through Parallel Branes: Ed Adams’ Medieval Metamodernism
In The Ghost Procession, a section from Ed Adams’ forthcoming novel, the Via Francigena—a medieval pilgrimage route stretching to Siena—becomes the unlikely stage for a posthuman morality play. Chaucer’s pilgrims re-materialise not as literary homage but as quantum survivals, spectral rehearsal. The past is not mere history, but infrastructure; myth repurposed as operating system.
Adams has always been preoccupied with systems that outlive their users—corporate, cosmological, or computational—and here he applies that fascination to medieval religion with a kind of wicked elegance. This isn’t “Canterbury Tales with aliens.” It’s metafiction in brane theory drag; a pilgrimage for entities who have lived 13.8 billion years and are finally forced to experience the humiliating specificity of embodiment.
The writing has a lush, fevered quality, as if crafted with one hand on the Book of Hours and the other on a neurolinguistic code editor. Sentences flicker between lyric and diagnostic:“Heat radiated from them— not temperature, but voltage.”
Even the physical world is described as a physics problem running in the background of a romance novel—one where desire is a catastrophic software update.
Adams’ narrative strategy is gleefully hybrid: part mythography, part metaphysics, part emotional autopsy. The medieval figures—the knight, the clerk, the pardoner—are not quaint cameos but symbolic load-bearing structures. They form an eerie parade of archetypes, “rehearsals” as one character puts it, preparing the road for a test the protagonists don’t yet understand.
And then there is the Wife of Bath.
Adams renders her not as comedic relief, but as a feral oracle of embodied truth—a medieval Dionysian algorithm, spitting prophecy with a mouthful of cider. Her best line, vulgar and correct, somehow carries the gravity of fate:
“Ye be two women with one wound between ye.
And the man shall crawl into it — willing or not.”
It is obscene, yes, but also devastatingly precise: sex, as always, is cosmology for amateurs.
The four Watchers—extratemporal intelligences crash-landed in a parallel reality—are variously amused, horrified, and undone. Their banter is thistly, British, and well-judged: a mechanism of denial fit for Cambridge, MI6, or a cold-brew startup in Shoreditch. Drake, the resident comic disaster, keeps insisting he’d prefer the straightforward trauma of wartime aerial combat:
“I miss the bomber. At least death there made sense.”
It’s a funny line in the moment; later, it echoes with something like grief.
The emotional centre, though, is the slowly dawning recognition that the woman called Arianna is less a character than a ritual function: a sacrifice disguised as agency. She is the Scryvaner, the key who must be left behind so the rest may return “home,” which in Adams’ lexicon means neither Earth nor heaven, but a native brane—another version of reality where their existence has meaning.
Adams resists the sentimental temptation to present this as noble martyrdom. Instead, he frames it as necessary cruelty, delivered in gentle cadence:
“I can survive this existence.
But I cannot cross with you.
Some doors open only when a key remains behind.”
The scene plays not like melodrama but like metaphysical logistics—an economy of beings, debt-ridden by their own ontology. Limantour, the one character who fully grasps the implications, carries the shock in a quiet, almost aristocratic mourning. And Adams’ prose, at its best, captures that grief with minimalist precision:
“It is easy to sacrifice others.
It is harder when they walk willingly.”
If there is a weakness, it lies in occasional tonal whiplash—between mythic gravitas and meme-adjacent banter. Yet, rather than feeling juvenile, the humour reads as recognisably contemporary: the self-defence reflex of a culture that meets catastrophe with punchlines because sincerity feels unsafe. One can imagine half the characters wearing vintage trainers and turning up late to a gallery opening, still carrying cosmic trauma.
Stylistically, this is a work that belongs to the emerging canon of metamodern speculative fiction: novels that refuse the antique divisions between science and the sacred, and that treat genre not as taxonomy but as toolkit. Adams shares DNA with writers like Mike McCormack, Anne Carson, and Tom McCarthy—authors who dismantle narrative and rebuild it with strange new joints.
What makes this excerpt compelling isn’t merely its conceptual ambition—there are plenty of novels with cosmology diagrams and no emotional temperature—but its recognition that metaphysics is nothing without heartbreak. The novel understands the terror of embodiment, not as erotic melodrama, but as existential hazard: the risk that feeling anything may overwrite everything.
In a literary landscape crowded with functional prose, Adams writes the kind of sentences that make you put the book down, stare into the middle distance, and wonder if medieval mystics were just early quantum theorists with worse lighting.
It is weird, dense, stylish, and occasionally deranged in the best possible way.
If Adams can sustain this register across a full book—balancing cosmic architecture with human ache—he may have written something that feels genuinely new, which is a far more radical achievement than merely writing something clever.
After all, as the Wife of Bath reminds us, in the vernacular of eternity:
“All men be built of lust and crumbs.
And when crumbs run out — lust remains.”
In Adams’ universe, that’s not a joke.
It’s a system specification.
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