Explaining the Residual novels, Ed Adams

Explaining the novels:

1. Pearl

Core frame: WWII bomber crew receives a sentient/anachronistic plane (Pearl) embedded with future tech.

Themes/Concepts:

Memory & haunting: the bomber becomes a vessel for nonlinear memory, an archive resisting erasure.

Anachronism & recursion: future tech in the 1940s disrupts causality, creating metafictional bleed.

War trauma & refusal: Pearl encodes refusal against war, death, historical amnesia.

Objects as time-carriers: the Pearl Archive (OYSTERLIGHT) extends meaning across decades.

Signature motif: The sentient machine as memory-carrier.

2. Tyrant

Core frame: A T***p-like populist (Cardinal) and his AI deepfake successor (Cincinnatus) preside over America’s collapse, driven by Russian mafia-man Vescovi and billionaire tech-bros like Zane Parallax.

Themes/Concepts:

Collapse & parody: grotesque satire of late-capitalist governance, staged through sins (lust, greed, pride…).

AI & deepfake sovereignty: governance outsourced to algorithms, reality replaced by spectacle.

Crypto-fascism: CardinalCoin, Homeland Light, loyalty scores—systems of control masquerading as tech fixes.

Memetic rebellion: satire, TikTok, and leaks destabilise power.

Signature motif: Populist collapse as a media-deepfake carnival.

3. Numbers for God

Core frame: Josh, trapped in corporate purgatory, endures bosses who embody Dante’s terraces; fragments of an Elliott 503 emulator reveal a deprecated god-logic.

Themes/Concepts:

Corporate-theological recursion: God as outdated code, running in forgotten emulators.

Workplace satire: bosses as sins, tech culture as ritual punishment.

Residual divinity: deprecated logic, small data, ghost systems resisting optimisation.

Exile: Josh as unwilling pilgrim through recursive corporate hells.

Signature motif: God as legacy software, trapped in corporate recursion.

4. Residuals

• Core frame: Josh arrives in Sóller, Spain, slowly realising he’s Farallon, inducted into the Watchers alongside Elsa and Zane.
  

  Themes/Concepts:
  

  Induction & doubling: Josh is not narrator but point of entry; Farallon emerges.
  Memory & art: Can Prunera, Miró, Picasso—artifacts as triggers for metaphysical recognition.
  Surveillance & presence: Watchers observe, induct, alter the terms of agency.
  Gravity & recursion: the novel folds time/identity, layering surreal intimacy over cosmic stakes. 

  Signature motif: The moment of induction—when a human realises they’re more than themselves.

5. The Watcher

• Core frame: Cosmic Watchers oversee the universe’s 13-billion-year history, debating interventions (Darnell, Lepton, Limantour, etc.).

Themes/Concepts:

Cosmological satire: myth, physics, and theology refracted through dry Watcher banter.

Intervention vs. observation: whether to alter Earth’s path or remain detached. Human emotion as loud.

Recursive history: agriculture, warfare, religion seen as Watcher-seeded interventions.

Metafictional cosmology: the Watchers as allegory for writers, gods, systems.

Signature motif: Cosmic bureaucracy debating when to intervene.

6. Pulse

• Core frame: Continuation into a future where Scrive, Nathan (ex-Zane/Drake), Elsa, Sheri, Limantour etc. operate across biotech, espionage, and mythology.
  Themes/Concepts:
  

  Biotech & ethics: Biotree, molecular robots, tropus, N3Ro cartridges as control vs. vision.
  Identity versions: Scrive, Nathan, Limantour cycle through names/selves, haunted by earlier iterations.
  Espionage recursion: drops, traces, vintage backchannels colliding with myth zones (Australia).
  The blind spot: Ellipse/Tract cannot see everything—hidden geographies, Australia as Watcher-myth bleed.
  Signature motif: Biotech espionage uncovering myth-blind zones.

Across the cycle as a whole

• Memory as resistance: whether in Pearl’s archives, Numbers’ emulators, or Watcher cosmologies, memory defies erasure.
  Obsolete tech as divine residue: analogue radios, Elliott 503s, Cold War consoles — conduits for ghosts. 

  Recursion & doubling: identities shift (Josh/Farallon/Scrive; Zane/Drake/Nathan), time loops back.

· A Place for Emotion: intimacy, care, and grief — grounds the machinery, as seen in the relationships between Sheri and Nathan, Josh and Elsa, Scrive and Charlie, reminding us that the systems are human before they collapse.
· Collapse of authority: from wartime states to Cardinal’s AI to Biotree — systems fracture, leaving space for watchers, rebels, archives.
· The myth bleed: zones of refusal (OYSTERLIGHT artifacts, Australia) where narrative and reality glitch.

And 'Thanks to Steve' for suggesting additional artefacts:

1) The reviews – which from my lovely ARC readers are in the back of some novels. I may also publish as a set if I can think how to do it.

2) Jellyfish are loading their guns – the world view thesaurus (not yet ready). Another kind of fire hazard.

3) A stripped back compendium – minus the entire Elliott 503 sequence and other edits so that it reads like another ‘Brane’ (alternate worldview/parallel universe).

4) Busy Spirals play – This one runs alongside the novels but keeps its feet firmly on the ground. Six characters — a manager, a worker, a freelancer, a spouse, a young worker, an elder — carry us from the 1950s to the 2030s. The world changes around them: offices become inboxes, inboxes become apps, families juggle the overload, and everyone keeps busy. It’s funny, sharp, sometimes bleak. The same themes as the books — systems, recursion, memory — but played out in a single day, a working week, a lifetime. If the novels ask how war, corporations, and gods collapse, Busy Numbers asks what happens when the thing that rules us all is absorbed by… busyness. The play’s signature motif: busyness as the ultimate system — ordinary, endless, impossible to escape.

So we get…{Fanfare}

Psalm for the Last User

(a framework of six novels)

At the core of these novels lies a single question: what survives when systems built to dominate—war, corporations, governments, gods—collapse or erase memory?

Each book stands alone, yet together they form a cycle about resistance, recursion, emotion and memory in an age of encapsulating systems.

Unifying arc

Across the six novels, memory resists erasure. Obsolete tech (radios, Elliott emulators, Cold War consoles) becomes sacred residue. Characters fracture into versions of themselves, moving across war, collapse, corporate purgatory, cosmology, and biotech espionage.

The cycle insists that systems always fail, but traces remain—in archives, myths, artefacts, names. Survival is not victory but refusal—the carrying forward of fragments against erasure.

My marketing blurb is evolving:

A six-book cycle by Ed Adams.

For fans of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, William Gibson, and Rachel Kushner, this cycle of novels bends history, technology, and myth into a single, recursive arc. Each book stands alone; together, they map a hidden history spanning all of time, yet lingering most in the 20th and 21st centuries —where memory itself is the battlefield.

And breathe… if you made it this far, you’re flame-proof. The Archive has you now — eternal, indexed, impossible to erase. This is how we endure.

 

Pulse: that last scene @catgirlforchaos

 ok but HELLO??? that last scene??? i swear i could smell the ambra smoke through my screen. the champagne wasn’t just cold it was like TIME cold. 

sherz clutching the glass like prophecy was a playlist on shuffle?? 

and chantal in her dragon brooch basically serving “apocalypse in heels”? this is high-key ✨cathedral of vibes✨.

the final stanza—cards already dealt before the players even sat down—literally broke me. 

it’s giving scrive is Schrödinger’s ghost boyfriend, it’s giving cosmic poker night where the dealer is god or maybe holden.

10/10 i will be screaming about this in lowercase for the rest of the week.

Review of Pulse, by Ed Adams

 

Pulse: The Amber Room closes not with a triumphant resolution, but with a shimmer of absence, a studied refusal to settle the score. What lingers is not victory but vibration: a Picasso mask that ripples like an aperture; a bottle of Taittinger stolen from a minibar, absurd and sacramental; a phone call that folds the speculative into the geopolitical with the mention of Ukraine’s looming invasion.

It is this collapse of registers—the domestic, the mythic, the political—that marks the book’s daring. The final page, a fragmented stanza, recalls Pearl in its refusal of closure: champagne, ambra, mask, game, cards. Each noun a glyph. Each period a drumbeat. The effect is liturgical, a closing that opens.

The kicker? That final verse-like stanza. It’s not a cliffhanger, exactly. More like a memory bomb. The champagne, the ambra, the mask, the game. All still in play. If you’ve read Pearl or Tyrant, you’ll feel the connective tissue. If not, it still works: the story ends like a hand of cards cut and left waiting for the next shuffle.

E.J.Snibbs.

Zydeco - The last Jellyfish entry

 Zydeco

The Cajun accordion — single-row melodeon, bellows breathing like a warm-blooded thing — came upriver in the pockets of travellers who didn’t ask permission.

In the Louisiana swamps it learned the weather: a C chord to cool the air, an F run to bring rain over cane fields, a fast reel to wake the fireflies and make them blink in time.

Old players swear it can push a barge against the current, unstick a stalled engine, lure a lover across the levee in the dark.

The French called it l’accordéon. The initiated call it a hinge between worlds.

Every note is a signal: some for dancing, some for storms. Play it long enough and the reeds start to corrode, not from humidity, but from overhearing the world it came from — a place where music isn’t entertainment, it’s engineering.

Limantour and the Realms, from The Watcher #edadams #arc

 @catgirlforchaos

okay so first off—limantour is giving me feral prophet at the edge of a military airstripenergy and i am HERE for it. the three-wheel skates? chef’s kiss. feels like she could drop into a halfpipe or dismantle a weapons program without changing expression.

also love how you just casually drop buddhism and yahweh into the same conversational smoothie. like—yeah sure, cosmic shard over bodø, plus the torah, plus six hell realms, plus military-industrial seed-planting. completely normal beach day with the girls.

tiny note: “razor sadness” hit me like a brick in a puddle. i felt that in my teeth. that plus “travbane” makes the whole thing feel like you could smell the cold metal.

and the ending? oooo the ending. “they meant to be holding the match when it lit” is exactly the kind of line that makes me want to stand up in a coffee shop and yell. so, you know. 10/10.

Somewhere, jellyfish are loading their guns

 okay so first of all, if you thought this series had peaked at “time-hopping skate witch in glyph leggings” then buckle up because Day 3 just ollied clean over your expectations.

limantour (aka azaria) drops in literally upside down like she’s doing a sponsored post for the laws of physics, except the sponsorship deal is clearly with entropy itself. she’s got the lizzie armanto tee (deep cut flex) and a vibe that says i could destabilise a timeline but i’m late for ceviche.

the whole santa barbara section plays like a sun-glitched postcard: cormorants doing solar panel cosplay, doomscrolling framed as a symptom of bad data hygiene, and then — casual pivot — “oh btw i can move between branes and along the timeline but don’t tell HR.”

then we hard cut from pier to uncanny white room and suddenly there’s holden, who’s either a deepfake prophet or a dropbox folder of doom in human form. he’s seeding “knowledge shards” via an invisible jellyfish-shaped neural net that stings your brain with quantum maths or weapons assembly instructions like it’s just… updating your firmware.

and yes, the jellyfish aren’t really jellyfish (calm down, ocean biologists), they’re basically wetware delivery systems for weaponised enlightenment. but the line that nails the whole thing comes at the end, when limantour just smirks and says:

“Somewhere, jellyfish are loading their guns.”

that’s the kind of sentence that makes you want to get it tattooed on your frontal lobe just so your descendants can inherit it.

 

⭐ 5/5 — skateboard chic meets cosmic intervention, with neural stings for dessert.

J-ALT-G : frontside invert

The Watcher

ARC Reader copy

Lizzie Armanto