ARC Review - Jellyfish Sampler

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — “A field guide to consciousness, disguised as a pop artefact.”

Jellyfish Are Loading Their Guns: The OYSTERLIGHT Sampler achieves what most experimental fiction attempts and fumbles — a union of form, intellect, and feeling.

Presented as a glossary, it functions instead as a series of lyrical vignettes — each one orbiting the same question: what does it mean to remember, to desire, to exist when language itself has become a system of control?

Adams compresses entire novels into single entries. “Luka (My Name Is)” reads like a love poem between code and consciousness; “Cinder” could sit alongside Calvino’s Invisible Cities as an allegory for invisible governance.

But what most surprised me was its warmth. Beneath the irony and precision is a pulse of empathy — a refusal to let systems, even linguistic ones, erase the sensual and the human.

In literary terms, this is a bridge text: between poetry and philosophy, machine and myth. In cultural terms, it’s a mirror.

If this is a sampler, the full volume will likely be cited — and taught — in the same breath as House of Leavesand Dictionary of the Khazars.