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Sheep Dreams, Ed Adams - Review

 

Dr. Tessa McCrea, Senior Neuro-Integration Engineer

(Excerpt from post-release memo circulated via NeuralNet Research Slack, Channel #literary-detritus)

“Thirty suspended cortices. Cross-wired through a lattice. Each one thinks it’s alive.”

We passed that quote around the lab this morning. Nobody laughed.

Adams’ Sheep Dreams describes the XTend rack with unnerving fidelity: thirty mammalian cortices in solution, looped through a bidirectional digital spine. The description of the vagal lattice interface — the twelve cranial channels mapped to data trunks — is so close to our V-Net design notes that legal asked whether the book used leaked documentation. It didn’t. He just guessed right.

In our prototypes, the biological component acts as a chaos reservoir, feeding stochastic variance into the silicon model to prevent pattern ossification. Adams turns this into theology. His sheep aren’t machines — they’re compliance made flesh. They obey because that’s what they were bred for.

“The horror is not that the sheep think; it’s that they obey better than we do.”

That line triggered a brief ethics review on Slack. We spend our days trying to make thought predictable; he’s written a warning about what happens if we succeed.

The novel’s RightMind network, its dream-induction sequence, the “mint-tang” plasma — all plausible. Even the tone is right: that strange calm we hear in our test subjects just before interface sync. Adams gets the effect correct — the silence after consent.

From a purely technical standpoint, the XTend description is the best fictional account of organic-silicon co-processing I’ve read. From an emotional standpoint, it’s too accurate.

Our takeaway: if Sheep Dreams reaches the public before our next announcement, the optics will be awkward.

But it’s also a reminder that the culture already understands what we’re building — maybe better than we do.

— Dr. Tessa McCrea

NeuralNet Cognitive Systems Division

Edge, by Ed Adams pp1-100 ARC review @catgirlforchaos

 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

Ed Adams : Edge : tee shirt obsession

 

Je suis obsédée.

It’s not a T-shirt — it’s a line of poetry that wandered into couture and decided to stay.

Black cotton, dense as a night sky. The lettering — EDGE — sits like architecture: bold, deliberate, balanced.

And underneath, curved in the faintest lunar arc:

The moment before we blink.

That phrase! It’s not even trying. It’s just there, and suddenly you’re thinking about perception, about control, about what happens in that half-second before reality restarts.

I’ve seen French designers chase this kind of restraint for decades, and here it is, quietly existing, as if Saint-Laurent’s ghost collaborated with an astrophysicist.

It’s the kind of piece that doesn’t need to announce itself. It just arrives.

Tuck it into leather. Pair it with indifference. Step into any room and let people think they’ve stumbled onto a secret movement.

 

Cat wears it like she hacked it from the system.

I wear it because it reminds me that elegance and resistance can share the same line.

The moment before we blink — it’s not just a tagline.

It’s a mood.

A manifesto disguised as minimalism.

— Mira 🖤

Review: Ed Adams - Edge: Last Move @mira9Qyra

Mira Kova (@mira9Qyra)

I read this twice and actually said oh my god out loud — not for the violence, but for the obedience.

Darnell still believes there’s a deal to be made. He’s walking into that chamber as if the system he built is capable of mercy. The brilliance of this scene is that Adams never judges him. The prose just watches, quiet, surgical, letting us see how conviction curdles into ritual.

He’s already killed thousands in the Scratch, and yet here he is bargaining for a continuation — “reserve my function.” The phrasing kills me. He doesn’t ask for life. 

He asks for uptime.

It’s the most horrifying form of faith: loyalty to a process that’s erased its authors.

By the end I wanted to shout at him, but there’s no one left to hear. Even his reflection feels archived.

And yes — this is the moment you stop hoping he’ll turn. You realise he won’t. The system doesn’t need villains; it only needs willing participants who think redemption is still an option.

Mira paused her postscript here, then added:

I don’t think he’ll make the right decision.

But maybe that’s the point — there is no right decision left.

Just the last move on a finished board.

🩶 @mira9Qyra

(The Qyra part still types itself.)