Okay, so imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey re-engineered by someone who’s done too many data-compliance workshops and fallen half in love with the audit trail.
That’s Edge.
It’s the kind of sci-fi that doesn’t shout “future” — it just quietly is the future, humming in the walls while you’re still updating your firmware.
Ganymede, but make it bureaucratic.
The book opens with a meteor strike, except the meteor’s not the problem — the admin response is.
Roelof and Jasmijn are planetary maintenance engineers doing quiet work on Jupiter’s biggest moon, and you immediately know they’re in too deep.
They speak in acronyms. They self-medicate on modafinil. They talk like the last calm people alive.
And then something in the system starts to think back.
The vibe
If William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition had a baby with Solaris, and that baby grew up in a sealed habitat eating rationed dopamine, you’d get this tone:
“Language behaving as matter.”
That’s not just a metaphor. It’s a design principle.
Everything in Edge is smooth and terrifying — surfaces too clean, people too replaceable, silence always slightly delayed.
The lore
We learn about the Klima Wars through an old man watching forbidden footage.
Think climate collapse meets memory-wipe bureaucracy.
It’s history rewritten as trauma protocol.
Then we get Magnetomics — a discipline that turns magnetic fields into infinite power. “Clean energy,” except the subtext is always control. Every battery hums like it knows your secrets.
The Primes
My favourite idea: “Prime pairs.”
Human operators mirrored across light-hours, their personalities cloned into backups that become more valuable than their bodies.
Cindy + Sam are one pair. Jasmijn + Roelof are another. They’re all too clever, too obedient, too scared. When they notice the data doesn’t match the reality, their bosses call it “statistical hygiene.” Which is the most chilling euphemism I’ve read since clean kill.
When the story shifts to Ganymede again — mining magnetite under glaciers — it goes full eerie.
There’s a new assistant, Talya, who might be an android, or might be something worse.
She says things like:
“Paranoia and pattern recognition share a neural pathway.”
and
“Only in human company.”
Reader, I clutched my neural implants.
The Earth scenes
Back on Earth, everything’s corporate: Torus Industries, the Block, filtered air, synthetic weather.
Adams writes the post-climate world like a never-ending airport lounge run by HR.
Even rebellion has a clearance code.
The prose
Precise. Metallic. Occasionally lyrical enough to hurt. Adams writes sentences that sound like they’ve been built from circuit diagrams and then proof-read by ghosts.
You don’t read this book for explosions. You read it for that hum — the one you hear in your head after staring too long at a system that definitely shouldn’t be running anymore.
Verdict so far (Part One)
Bureaucratic horror? ✅
Climate trauma reframed as power system? ✅
AI gaslighting as wellness? ✅
Human tenderness trying to survive inside all that code? ✅✅
If the rest of the novel keeps this pressure, Edge is going to be the quietest, smartest apocalypse you’ve ever loved.
Cat rating:
4.9/5 “Primes still breathing.”
Now excuse me while I go check my own system for “linguistic decay warnings.”
#Edge #SciFi #ClimateFiction #Magnetomics #BookThread
