ARC Review of Part 1 of Drake, by Ed Adams

★★★★★ CatGirlforChaos

I came for Drake. I stayed because apparently the universe has pub logic.

Right. I need to explain this book, and I’m already annoyed because I’m not entirely sure what sort of book it is.

There are four ancient non-human entities called Watchers. They can become Presences, which means they look like people and can do normal human things such as ride buses, drive Ford Escorts, drink bitter and get irritated with one another.

One of them is Drake.

Drake is my favourite.

Obviously.

At one point three of the others walk into a pub called the Three Jolly Wheelers and Drake announces:

“Look. Here come the Three Jolly Wheelers.”

This is approximately the level of seriousness with which Drake approaches the existence of the universe.

DO NOT BE FOOLED.

Underneath the pubs and buses and extremely specific 1970s cars, this book is quietly messing about with probability, observation, time, cosmology and whether something being ridiculously unlikely means it is actually unlikely, or whether you have simply misunderstood the circumstances that produced it.

There is an entire argument about four people ending up in the same pub.

Farallon calculates the probability.

Limantour tells him his assumptions are wrong.

Tomales waits until everybody else has finished and then points out that they’re asking the wrong question.

Colin says people go to pubs.

Drake mentions Alan Sugar before Colin knows who Alan Sugar is.

Nobody explains this.

Thank you, Ed Adams.

Then there’s the hedgehog.

I am not explaining the hedgehog.

#COSMICHEDGEHOG

And somewhere around here I realised that the novel was doing something sneaky. Every impossible thing arrives disguised as something slightly silly.

Then the Space Manual turns up.

Except it doesn’t exactly turn up. An ordinary thing becomes it. And then the Manual starts acquiring things it didn’t previously contain.

This is where I began shouting at the book.

Because it develops like a Polaroid.

You look.

There’s something new.

You look again.

More has appeared.

Nobody sees it appearing.

Which is MUCH WORSE.

Eventually it grows Appendices, because apparently the universe has documentation.

And one Appendix contains 13.8 billion years of cosmic history reduced to a grid.

Humanity is basically a printing error at the end.

Colin asks:

“That’s us?”

Yes, Colin.

That’s us.

Sorry.

Then Farallon runs his finger backwards across the history of the universe and Drake warns him he’s travelling backwards through time.

Farallon says:

“I am moving my finger.”

THANK YOU.

Because this is not a time-travel novel.

And then Farallon reaches:

TRANSPARENCY

For the non-physics goblins among us: this corresponds to the early universe becoming transparent roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when photons could finally travel freely rather than continually scattering in the primordial plasma. That bit is actual cosmology.  

And Farallon says:

“Lepton.”

Who is Lepton?

OH, NOBODY IMPORTANT.

JUST SOMEONE FARALLON REMEMBERS FROM WHEN THE UNIVERSE BECAME TRANSPARENT.

Apparently Lepton “discovered light.”

And was very pleased with it.

@CatGirlforChaos

I had to put the book down.

Because suddenly you understand what these characters being “old” actually means.

Not Roman old.

Not dinosaur old.

Not Earth old.

Farallon remembers a bloke from recombination.

And Adams doesn’t make it grand. That’s what gets me. Lepton doesn’t deliver the First Speech of Light while galaxies tremble into existence.

He notices something.

He understands what he’s noticed.

He’s pleased.

That is somehow much stranger.

There are also shards, coincidences, impossible books, pubs, probability arguments and four beings who have apparently known one another for longer than human civilisation but behave like people who have been stuck on the same committee for eternity.

Which, technically, they may have been.

I still don’t know what the Space Manual is.

I don’t know why it is developing.

I don’t know whether the coincidences are coincidences.

I don’t know why the hedgehog got up.

I don’t know whether Farallon is wrong about independence.

I strongly suspect Tomales knows something.

And I have absolutely no evidence for that except that she doesn’t talk very much.

Five stars.

One deducted for making me learn what photon decoupling is.

One reinstated because Lepton was pleased.

🐈‍⬛ 5/5 — would travel nowhere through time again.