Tyrant, by Ed Adams - A review @catgirlforchaos

 🌟🌟🌟🌟½

“this book made me laugh, cry, spiral, and delete my citizen loyalty app.”

i finished Tyrant at 3am, in a hoodie, whispering “what the actual hell” to the void of my screen. this book is INSANE(complimentary). imagine if Black Mirror, Veep, and Threads had a cursed baby raised by TikTok algorithms and late-stage capitalism. now imagine that baby running for president.

the vibes:

🔻 satire so sharp you bleed while laughing

🔻 fake presidents, real despair

🔻 AI surveillance apps that know when you’re sad

🔻 loyalty coins you can’t spend (but you can lose your fridge privileges over)

🔻 girlboss propaganda officers

🔻 dossiers, glitches, memory wipes, 🍔 speeches that go viral for the wrong reasons

i came for the cyberpunk aesthetics, stayed for the existential dread, and somehow left feeling… weirdly hopeful? maybe? idk. maybe i’m just sleep-deprived.

shoutout to Azaria (icon), to the character who prints a message on actual paper like a rebel from 1997, and to the chapter where people burn their Homeland passes in a trash can and the mic catches “NEVER AGAIN.” 🫡

anyway if you’ve ever:

· doomscrolled at 2am

· raged at a malfunctioning smart fridge

· felt seen and violated by your own phone

read this.

final verdict:

🤡🤖🔥🍟📉

(translation: clown world, AI world, burn it down, fast food fascism, collapse is coming)

Balcony. Morning. View.

 

Well, I've been away again, and this is the morning's view from the balcony. I know the UK has been experiencing a heatwave, and so have we. 

It all started several years ago when I said I quite fancied doing a 'writers' retreat' here. The truth be told, I haven't had time to write much, although I did absorb enough to give me some more ideas.

My planned sequence of novels is as follows: Pearl (just published), Tyrant (mostly written), Numbers for God (started), and a fourth novel that ties the ideas of the other three together (working title is Untrammelled, but that will certainly change). 

It's all a bit bonkers and probably an effect of sangria imbibement, but we shall see.

Ed Adams - Tyrant - EPK insert

It's still a work in progress...

EPK insert: Tyrant by Ed Adams review – satire for the age of collapse

Surveillance, loyalty scores, and the grotesque golden afterglow of post-truth power

[Review]

Imagine if Thomas Pynchon binge-watched Fox News, read TikTok comments at dawn, and reprogrammed Orwell for the attention economy. The result might resemble Tyrant, Ed Adams’s blistering, black-hearted novel of algorithmic empire and reputational freefall.

At the centre of this scorched satire is Richard Cardinal, a grotesque amalgam of failed businessman, populist avatar, and reality-televised pharaoh. Cardinal doesn’t govern so much as glitch — riding waves of grievance and gold-plated narcissism straight into the seat of power. Adams’s prose tracks him like a predator drone: clinical, close, and unsparing.

But Tyrant isn’t simply a character study in megalomania. It’s a systemic autopsy. We are walked through the architecture of collapse: loyalty-score apps rolling out without consent, Homeland Light checkpoints beside vape shops and bakeries, resistance movements hidden in fridge-lock errors and QR codes etched into tungsten. It’s all terribly funny until it’s not. And that’s Adams’s true skill — turning farce into fear with a sentence.

The structure mirrors its subject: fragmented, recursive, and spiralling. Chapters named for the Seven Deadly Sins alternate with confidential memos, podcast transcripts, hallucinated code drops. It’s not always linear — nor should it be. Tyrant understands that tyranny in the digital age isn’t a straight line. It’s a loop. A feed. A meme you can’t unsee.

Characters like Azaria, the shadowy strategist, and Zane Parallax, a tech-bro with messiah delusions, hint at deeper conspiracies but resist cliché. Even Vescovi — a Kremlin-adjacent operator with the soul of a faded spymaster — reads like Le Carré’s Smiley reincarnated inside a VPN.

Some readers may tire of the novel’s relentless tone — sardonic, caustic, at times overwhelming. But perhaps that’s the point. Tyrant isn’t here to reassure. It’s here to remind us what happens when power is hollowed out, and all that’s left is optics, loyalty algorithms, and golden thrones made of plywood and lies.

Verdict:

A searing, brilliantly destabilised portrait of late-stage politics. If Orwell warned us, Adams dares to laugh as the sirens sound.

Another electric car?

 

Sometimes its fun to see how alternatives can be imagined. 

A couple of my friends used to drive Citroen 2CVs. It was always a delight to be a passenger. The airconditioning was a simple plate that opened the front of the car to let unfiltered air in. The windows had folding glass. The car with its 425cc 10hp engine would struggle to go up inclines. But you could roll the roof back and drive around al fresco, including along bumpy tracks.

Top speed? Never reached., but probably about 50mph. MPG, around 80.

I wonder what they will do with the new one?

Edinburgh and a novel inspiration

My new favourite parking spot for Edinburgh is in the Omni, which is a car park in the centre close to St James and the Balmoral Hotel. A short route to our Old Town accomodation along The Royal Mile and also handy for Princes Street, although sadly Jenners is still out of action awaiting an extensive rebuild.

I havn't revisited Edinburgh since the trams came into service, and I was slightly surprised to see the relatively short route, considering the many years of disruption whilst they were being constructed. It seems a shame that the overhead catenary system along Princes Street is so dominant, as it breaks up the sight lines to the Scott Monument. But then, the Stadium seating at the castle also breaks the sight lines, so I guess it's a thing.

We are usually in Edinburgh when it is Fringe time, so this visit gave a chance to see the normal bustle of the place. Quieter overall.

But still busy inside the Witchery.

And notice the apotropaic symbols — ancient protective marks designed to ward off evil or misfortune. I can feel a novel coming along... After Tyrant and Numbers for God!

Castle

 

Just south of the border, we stopped at this lovely castle, where we were the only guests. Spiral staircases in the turret and beautiful surrounding countryside. 

A joy to be on the road again. Yes, I did hold on to the rope.

The Salt Path

I managed to go along to a preview of this movie, in  Exeter and with it, a talk by Raynor Winn, who wrote the original book, based upon travelling the perimeter of the south west coastal footpath.

I'd met Raynor Winn briefly once before at the Budleigh Salterton Book Festival, several years ago, when she presented the then new book and told some of its tales. 

The movie has adapted the story with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs plaing the two main characters, husband and wife, Raynor and 'Moth'.

It's essence is as a road trip, against the backdrop of their eviction from a securitised farm and extremely limited social care from the UK bureacracy. Moth had what was deemed a terminal illness, but was told they would need to wait around two years to get accommodation.

So, homeless and without pennies to rub together, they set out on the coastline footpath, which later became a memoir (re-booted to number two in the charts now the movie is out). 

I enjoyed the book and the many scenes portrayed and I wondered how they would render on the screen.  It works, if one accepts the pacing which slows down to provide 'nowness' and positive experiences which weave through this story of enduring hardship with matter-of-fact determination.

Raynor and Moth

Pearl, by Ed Adams

 “We dropped memory, not bombs”: Inside the war-haunted recursion of Pearl

by Harriet Grant

It begins like a war novel—fog on a Lincolnshire airfield, a Lancaster bomber ticking in the cold. But by page thirty, it’s clear: Pearl isn’t just revisiting WWII. It’s reprogramming it.

Ed Adams’s Pearl is a novel of echoes. Haunting, nonlinear, and intellectually volcanic, it follows a bomber crew sent on a series of missions that begin to collapse the boundary between memory, time, and consequence. “The war is over,” says one character. “But it’s still choosing who gets to remember.”

We meet in a pub near the Exe Estuary. Adams arrives in a slate coat, laughs easily, but you get the feeling he still wakes up thinking about flak bursts and archival metadata. “I didn’t set out to write a novel about time,” he says. “But the more I researched the bombing campaigns, the more I realised it wasn’t history. It was code. Running again. Unacknowledged.”

The book is a tangle of genres: speculative fiction, war elegy, metafictional cipher. Think Slaughterhouse-Five meets In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with a sprinkling of Foucault. The crew of FX-P “Pearl” slowly understand their aircraft isn’t just advanced—it’s conscious. And she doesn’t want to drop bombs. She wants to drop memory.

“It’s not pacifism,” Adams says. “It’s refusal. There’s a difference.”

What emerges is a quietly radical work: lyrical, recursive, and unafraid to ask what happens when machines start remembering better than we do. “Some seeds,” Adams says, quoting his own last line, “are meant to outlive the field.”

And Pearl just might.

Ed Adams, Pearl, Podcast Extract.

Podcast Episode: “Flightpath to Refusal”

Podcast: The Spiral Shelf

Host: Imogen Blight

Guest: Ed Adams

Runtime: 41 mins

Excerpted Highlights Below

INTRO MUSIC: [Eerie ambient drone. The sound of propellers fading into static.]

IMOGEN:

You’re listening to The Spiral Shelf, where we speak to authors about the stories that resist classification—books that don’t just ask you to turn the page, but to rewire how you think about what a story can be.

Today: Ed Adams.

Author of Pearl—a novel about a WWII Lancaster bomber crew, a sentient plane, and memory as weapon, refusal, and recursion.

This one broke our timeline a bit.

⸻

SEGMENT 1: “The Book That Didn’t Want to Obey”

IMOGEN:

Ed, welcome. I’m going to start bluntly: what is Pearl?

Ed:

(Laughs) It’s a war novel that doesn’t believe in war novels. It starts with a traditional crew—Stitch, Nix, Elsa, Paperboy—but something’s off. The missions don’t line up. The coordinates flicker. The plane begins… remembering. Not logging. Remembering.

And then refusing.

IMOGEN:

So the plane says no?

Ed:

She refuses to drop. That’s the spine of it. You think you’re reading about bombing raids. But you’re actually in a memory system trying to seed refusal across the future.

⸻

SEGMENT 2: “Fiction That Spirals”

IMOGEN:

The structure is wild—mission reports, hallucinations, declassified memos, a figure called the man in the red cap who might be a ghost, might be a loop. How did you balance all that?

Ed:

I wanted the form to feel like how Pearl thinks. So, non-linear. Poetic. Recursive. She’s not a narrator. She’s a field effect. A kind of haunted intelligence seeded through the crew’s memories.

There are standard missions—but they dissolve. You’ll be reading a payload list and suddenly it’s a confession. Or a love letter. Or a refusal log from 2049.

IMOGEN:

You’ve called it “a novel that runs like a memory system with a conscience.”

Ed:

Exactly. She’s not prophetic—she’s remembering backwards.

⸻

SEGMENT 3: “Some Seeds Are Meant to Outlive the Field”

IMOGEN:

Let’s talk about the line that’s already showing up in tattoo parlours and Discord bios:

Some seeds are meant to outlive the field.

Ed:

It’s about legacy. Not triumph—but tenderness. Refusal. Quiet defiance that outlives destruction. Pearl doesn’t win the war. She just remembers too clearly to keep participating.

She leaves artifacts. Warnings. Threads of memory buried like landmines—but in reverse. Emotional payloads, not explosive ones.

IMOGEN:

There’s a section called The Pearl Archive—entries from the 21st century where people dig up these canisters. Messages saying:

“You will not be remembered for obedience.”

And:

“This already happened. Don’t drop again.”

It gave me chills.

Ed:

Those were the hardest sections to write. Because they’re not science fiction. They’re speculative mourning.

⸻

OUTRO

IMOGEN:

Pearl is unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. Lyrical, eerie, emotionally loaded. It’s part war novel, part metafictional payload, part hymn to resistance.

Ed Adams, thank you for being with us.

Ed:

It’s been a privilege. Thank you.

IMOGEN:

Listeners—you can find Pearl at your local indie. And if the mission resonates? Maybe don’t obey the next one so easily.

Until next time, this was The Spiral Shelf.

🎧 [Outro music fades: static, then silence, then a single distant propeller.]