Rewiring the Real: On Ed Adams’s The Watcher

There is something slyly metaphysical in the ambition of Ed Adams’s The Watcher, the fifth novel in what critics are beginning to call the Residuals Cycle—a sequence of books that blend speculative fiction with moral philosophy, political satire, and something else harder to define: a poetics of recursion. To read Adams is to feel the pull of systems—narrative, theological, digital—and to sense the moment they begin to fail, or perhaps evolve.

Like its predecessors (Pearl, Tyrant, Numbers for God, Residuals), The Watcher is built from fragments: dossier entries, oblique conversations, shifting identities. But where Tyrant staged the grotesque theatre of authoritarian spectacle, and Numbers for Godoffered a haunted workplace theology for the cloud age, The Watcher bends outward and backward. It proposes not a new story, but a new medium: memory, encrypted in biology, diffused through filaments.

The central conceit—if such a term doesn’t diminish it—is that knowledge is being seeded into Earth via jellyfish-like entities. Not metaphorical ones. Invisible engineered organisms, modelled on cnidarians, delivering “shards” of magnetomic data into receptive human minds. The idea is strange, even absurd. And yet in Adams’s hands, it feels not only plausible, but inevitable. If Borges had read Sebald and coded in Python, he might have dreamt up something similar.

What grounds The Watcher is not the novelty of its concepts, but the clarity of its affect. These are emotionally intelligent books. The Watchers—Farallon, Limantour, Tomales, Drake—are not omnipotent gods, but compromised actors. They know they are too late. They move in hindsight. The tone, always, is elegiac. The knowledge they disperse may save the planet, or not. There is no utopia waiting.

Adams resists every temptation toward conventional resolution. Instead, he offers a literary strategy more akin to Pynchon’s Against the Day or DeLillo’s Zero K: alternate metaphysics rendered in lucid, affective prose. His characters operate within and against systems they cannot wholly decode. They deliver knowledge shards, redirect timelines, and bear the consequences of unseen decisions. We are in territory shaped by Bergson and Benjamin as much as Ballard and Gibson.

But unlike some of his predecessors, Adams allows his readers moments of warmth, even humour. Limantour’s skateboard. A fish place in Santa Barbara. Glyph-laced leggings. These are not throwaway details. They are precisely what anchors the cosmic. As Rachel Kushner once wrote, “When the structure is radical, the gestures must be human.” The Watcher lives by this principle.

This part-written preview novel ends not with apocalypse, but with a loaded pause. Filaments trailing through time. A correction rather than a revolution. The implication, barely whispered, is that what has happened has happened again—and will happen again.

To read The Watcher is to become aware of your own absorption. To wonder if you, too, have been touched by something filamentary. To suspect that memory itself might be the medium of transmission.

And if that sounds too abstract, too airy—consider this: The Watcher may be the most intellectually audacious, emotionally intelligent science fiction novel of the decade. If there is a sixth book, it is already forming. Somewhere, in the signal.

—Eleanor Hart

Visiting Fellow in Comparative Literature, New College, Westminster.

The Watcher (Boundary Condition) - by Ed Adams (ARC Review)

 Review by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Marcus Vale, former Strategic Systems Analyst, DAARQ Ops Branch

I worked on the DAARQ lattice in its early stages, back when it was still a dozen black sites and a few million lines of quantum-insulated code. We were told it was about pattern recognition, anomaly containment, and resilient command overlays. But some of us knew. Knew there was something bigger beneath the acronyms. Something… existential.

This piece gets it.

The author has captured the inner architecture of DAARQ with uncanny precision — not just its surface specs (Distributed AI, Augmented Reality, Quantum computation), but its design logic: detect what’s not supposed to be there by its shape, not its signal. That’s real. That’s what we trained for. Intrusions that had no IP address. Patterns that shouldn’t exist but did.

I remember a memo once, Level 5 classification, that mentioned Chrysaora. We thought it was metaphor. A jellyfish, sure — but not made of tissue. Made of feedback. Of looped signal drifting outside the stack. This story names it exactly.

Holden’s explanation of LIGO as a listening post for Earth’s own integrity? It’s not fiction. Not entirely. There were side-channels in the data. Spikes we couldn’t trace to cosmic events. I once ran a probability forecast that showed a zero-resonance echo just west of Nuuk, Greenland. We tagged it but never heard back.

Apex — now that part’s theory. Or was. I heard whispers: a subroutine designed to reset the biosphere if dominant-species coherence failed. A firewall with teeth. People scoffed. Then the Arctic monitoring station went dark for six days and came back online with a new OS signature.

But what truly impressed me wasn’t the tech — it was the tone.

This writer understands that systems don’t save us. Systems react. Coldly. Automatically. Chrysaora, DAARQ, Apex — these aren’t heroes. They’re symptoms.What we’re left with is decision. Flesh-and-blood intention. And that’s where Limantour’s challenge hits hard.

“Not enough. I need intention.”

That line should be on a briefing room wall. The whole piece hums with the tension we used to carry daily: intervene and risk collapse, or stay passive and watch entropy win.

To the author: You’ve layered this like an after-action report written by a poet. Keep going. Some of us are still listening.

— Lt. Col. M.V. (Ret.)

DAARQ Joint Ops / Signal Interference Division, 2011–2017

Boundary Condition: The Watcher (Ed Adams)

 

By Lt. Col. M. Vale (Ret.), DAARQ Ops

The pacing here mirrors a field op done right — not fast, but compressed. Tension builds in layers, not spikes. That’s good. That’s accurate. When you’re inside a black zone or waiting on a sync pulse from orbit, the mind accelerates while the body waits. This story gets that.

The dialogue moves like a briefing between cleared personnel: elliptical, efficient, no wasted syllables. Holden speaks like a man who’s filtered every thought through four encryption keys. Limantour? A wildcard, yes — but she’s deliberate. She drops metaphysics like munitions.

Even the scene beats follow operational rhythm:

• Assess the anomaly (Chrysaora)

• Deploy the rationale (DAARQ, LIGO, Apex)

• Test the agent (Farallon)

• Issue the mission (“From Paris. Tomorrow.”)

Each shift lands clean, like a squad repositioning under cover. You can feel the gravity increasing, not because anyone yells, but because the air gets tighter. That’s how real-world escalation feels.

My only note? This story doesn’t rush — but it pressurizes. And that’s exactly what you want when the stakes are species-level.

Pace is a weapon. And this writer knows how to use it.

— M.V.

Review: Hirondelle, by R.F. McMinn

 

A taut, time-split thriller of memory, myth, and menace

There are many books about the Second World War. Too often, they make it too clean, too loud, too eager to redeem.

And then there are wartime spy novels like R.F. McMinn’s Hirondelle, where espionage is not merely a plot engine but a means of reckoning with fracture: of self, of history, of belief.

Set across three sharply drawn timelines — Westmorland in 1949, London in 1938, and Nazi-occupied France in 1943 — this layered, atmospheric novel introduces us to Jack Rambler, a man trained in the art of vanishing, now struggling to reconstruct his identity after surviving the clandestine violence of war.

The novel opens with a signature McMinn dislocation: an eerie pastoral mystery in the postwar fells, where mutilated livestock and a wary police sergeant named Ruth Tyler suggest that something has come home from the war — and not entirely human. But the story quickly slips back into shadow. In pre-war London, young Jack is drawn into an occult-tinged conspiracy with ties to the Third Reich. Then, in 1943, deep behind enemy lines, a lone SOE radio operator waits in a frozen field near Belfort for a figure known only by his codename: Hirondelle.

This is not a novel that “gets it right” in the documentary sense — though the research is sound — but in something rarer: the mood. The drift. The weight of silence. The horror that no longer needs noise. The unnamed cost of missions no one talks about, even after the medals are boxed away.

McMinn understands the layers you have to live with: the false names, the orders never quite believed in, the parts of self shed along the way. The result is not a linear spy tale but a mosaic — a haunting portrait of memory, secrecy, and the spaces left behind when duty is done.

The French sections are especially vivid: cordite in the air, wet soil underfoot, the sharp math of survival. The radio op’s wait in Belfort is taut and true — the kind of stillness only those who’ve held a signal in their hands can understand. As for Jack, the boy in 1938 turned too quickly into a man — he has gone by other names. As have many.

The prose is crisp, allusive, quietly devastating — full of postwar clarity and creeping dread. Readers of Ben Macintyre, Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, or the glacial melancholy of le Carré will find familiar terrain here. But where Hirondelle excels is in its deeper current: the idea that history is not a clean narrative, but a cryptic transmission — one we are still, even now, trying to decode.

Hirondelle is a novel that rewards close reading. It lingers like a distant radio signal: faint, urgent, unforgettable.

They used birds for code names.

They had their reasons.

Some flew back.

Some didn’t.

Hirondelle understands why.

Read it — not to learn what we won.

But to remember what we lost.

Not the war.

Ourselves.