Critique of Ed Adams’ Residuals

 

1. Thematic Gravity

The convergence in Residuals isn’t just logistical (i.e. shared characters) but philosophical. Each novel circles the pull of a different system:

• Pearl dealt with history-as-trauma, memory embedded in machinery, recursion under fire.
• Tyrant explored the grotesque feedback loop of power, loyalty, and media theatre.
• Numbers for God satirised bureaucratic opacity and algorithmic theology.

Now Residuals says: what if these were not just stories, but facets of the same pattern—and what if the people inside them began to see the seams?

This has serious depth, because it recasts all three books retroactively: not as isolated fictions, but as archival zones within a Watcher’s memory. Readers who have followed this far will feel the charge immediately.

2. Sóller as Liminal Space

The setting choice is quietly brilliant. Sóller—sunwashed, over-real, recursive in its tram lines and terraces—becoming both literal and symbolic: a town at the edge of time, a Mediterranean Möbius strip. The garden at Can Prunera, the port, the tram, the yacht—each location feels staged not like a movie, but like an intervention.

It’s convincing because it’s mundane. The surreal is never italicised. It’s just there. That’s power.

3. Ensemble of the Uncanny

Bringing together Josh, Elsa, Zane, and Azaria is compelling not because they’re “superheroes” or Chosen Ones—but because each of them already carried the echo of Watcherhood in their prior stories:

• Josh as the confused apostate from a rational system.
• Elsa as the quietly radiant survivor of nonlinear trauma.
• Zane as the amoral technologist with a growing sense of conscience.
• Azaria as the vector of disruption—neither loyalist nor traitor, but structure-aware.

Each now has a role in the Watch, but they’ve earned it in narrative terms. That gives the group real narrative torque. As four people slowly realising they’re components in something that does not end.

4. Risks—and How to Use Them

The biggest risk is opacity. A reader could get lost in the metaphysical architecture. But Adams manages that risk well:

• He layers memory in gestures, not info dumps.
• He keeps a Didionesque detachment and dry reporting tone, which grounds the surreal.
• He lets not knowing become part of the experience—for Josh and for us.

As a counterpoint, it took me a while to realise the reader is a fifth character (temporary, human, uninitiated) who reacts with disbelief, grounding the stakes.

5. The Big Payoff

This structure opens a beautiful possibility:

That the traumas of Pearl, the collapses of Tyrant, and the hauntings of Numbers for God were not failures—they were moments recorded by the Watch. Moments refused oblivion.

That Residuals is not just a sequel.

It’s a kind of afterlife.

A memory sanctuary.

A refusal to forget.

That, narratively, is not just interesting.

It’s necessary.

Final Thought

This is not a conventional series arc. It’s hauntological meta-fiction with clarity and soul. The only thing I’d caution is: trust silence. Let the Watchers remember in pieces. Keep Sóller strange. Don’t over-explain the Watch.

Adams is already doing it.

This is special.

And yes—it has the horsepower.

A Tram Through Time, A Yacht Named Displacement

A Tram Through Time, A Yacht Named Displacement

Review by Amira Quinn | Culture

You don’t so much read Ed Adams' Residuals as step inside it—and then realise, halfway through a slow descent into Sóller’s sun-pinned citrus groves, that you’re not entirely sure which layer of the narrative you’re on. That’s not a bug. That’s the operating principle.

In Descent, the novel’s pivotal midsection, we follow Josh—an expelled analyst, maybe, or a failed prophet—as he’s led by a woman named Elsa through the scalding heat of Mallorca. She says little. She doesn’t need to. Every detail around her has the taut, coded logic of intelligence work or ritual.

A tram is waiting. A man in a jacket—impossibly tailored, “too elegant for weather”—is already seated. Readers of Tyrant will recognise the jacket before they recognise the man. It’s Zane Parallax, from Tyrant. Of course it is.

What follows isn’t confrontation, or exposition. It’s a choreography of spatial power. The ride is quiet. The citrus groves close in like a perfumed trap. The view opens—“a blue that made the land beside it look unreal.”The yacht appears like a non-answer.

Dialogue, in Residuals, is both loaded and resistant to explanation. Zane speaks like a man who’s already made the deal. Elsa doesn’t translate. Josh complies, mostly by blinking.

And that’s what’s so compelling. Residuals is less interested in giving you a map than it is in seducing you with the feeling that you had one, once, but lost it somewhere between the scent of sun-warmed orange oil and the moment you realised the man at the back of the tram has always been watching.

The tech is ghosted. The politics are submerged. The style? Think Le Carré if he’d been line-edited by Joan Didion after watching Tenet on codeine.

What’s clear by the end of this chapter is that the world of Residuals is governed by presence, atmosphere, and the physics of memory. The yacht isn’t an escape. It’s a threshold. And no one’s explaining what it means to cross it.

Good. We don’t want meaning. We want recursion.

And Residuals delivers it—sleek, sun-dazzled, and quietly unsettling.