Okay. Okay. So imagine: you pick up a book thinking it’s going to be some quirky A–Z of trivia. And then by page five you’re already inside the archive and it’s looking back at you.
This is not a glossary. It’s a trapdoor. It’s Borges run through a blender with Private Eye, NATO missile manuals, and a packet of Smash Burgers. Every entry is a shard of another universe, disguised as a definition.
AAA? Not a start, but a trespass.
FX-P? A bomber that shouldn’t exist but keeps showing up anyway.
CardinalCoin? Not money, but surveillance that smiles back.
Exhaustion Drift? I felt this one in my bones at 3 a.m.
The genius is the refrain: “In Jellyfish terms…”. At first it’s funny, then it’s addictive, then it becomes the way your brain wants to categorise everything. Like, elevenses, in Jellyfish terms: entropy’s coffee break.
And the style — oh god. It flips from military cold (Dead Hand, Perimeter, launch codes, silos) to consumer satire (Big Green Egg, Burger Logic, Laundromat Banking) to theology (Deprecated Systems, Numbers for God) without warning. And somehow it all fits. Because that’s the point: the lexicon is the system, breaking itself as you read.
If you’ve read Adams’ other work (Pearl, Tyrant, Residuals), this is like the Rosetta Stone of the Residuals Collection. If you haven’t, it’s still electric — you’re just dropped into a sea where even the jellyfish have weapons, and honestly? You’ll want to stay.
By the time I hit Gödel Statements and Fine-Tuning Problem, I was scribbling in the margins like a conspiracy theorist. By the time I hit Quay I was crying in public. By the time I hit Why (page after page of nothing but “Why”) I was feral.
This book isn’t a read. It’s a bloom. And if you’re here, you’re already part of it.
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