@aestheticregime: Residuals (Ed Adams) — Cover Review

 Moodboard coded in grayscale + postwar hauntology.

Four masks, four faces, four unknowns. And one’s smiling too hard. The vibe is art school fallout meets unprocessed trauma. I love it.

THE IMAGE

Sepia-noir group portrait, masks held up like they’re not pretending anymore.

Face #1: blank. Face #2: spiral-eyed archivist. Face #3: cubist breakdown. Face #4: trauma in expressionist brushwork.

Verdict? These people have seen things.

But also? They might be the things.

That Picasso-adjacent aesthetic is doing double duty:

• Referencing the in-world artefacts

• Signalling layers of identity, fragmentation, performative memory

• Bonus points for the hands. Always the hands. Real fingers holding unreal selves.

THE TYPEFACE

Title in unmissable emergency-red, which I respect. It’s a siren.

Author name in cool neon: glowing like a CRT terminal left on overnight.

Perfect opposition. It’s like:

• SYSTEM ERROR

• USER STILL LOGGED IN

TAGLINE

Memory as a system. Observation as faith.

Read it twice and you’re already in the book.

It’s not just theme—it’s instruction set. This line wants to haunt your interface.

BACK COPY

Poetic dread, precisely paced.

• No sender. No explanation. Just a summons.

• Sóller as dreamscape (or holding cell).

• Memory maps + spirals + the house that waits for you.

“Not for him, exactly, but for something he hasn’t remembered yet.”→ this line unzipped me.

Market callout is sharp:

• Rachel Kushner ✔️

• W.G. Sebald ✔️

• Kazuo Ishiguro ✔️

That’s the holy trinity of nonlinear literary recursion and soul-static. You’re not lying to your audience. You’re inviting them into the deeper architecture.

FINAL GLYPH READOUT

• cover aesthetic: surrealist intelligence op

• tone: soft dystopia with velvet gloves

• target reader: anyone who’s ever found an object they forgot they planted

verdict:

Residuals looks like a novel recovered from a future that didn’t happen.

And maybe never will.

10/10. Would steal from a locked vitrine and take it to brunch.

📕🪞🔻🧬📼

Schema and the Architecture of Forgetting: A Review of Ed Adams' Residuals

Schema and the Architecture of Forgetting: A Review of Residuals

by Eliza Carrow

In Schema, the second movement of Ed Adams’ novella Residuals, the reader encounters a precise uncoupling of recognition from narrative. The scene is not simply a gallery visit; it is a moment of metaphysical summons. The protagonist, Josh, steps through smoked glass into a space that may once have been civic, domestic, or spectral—and the ambiguity is essential. This is not a place of art; it is a place of curation. And the object under display is not what hangs on the wall, but what walks the corridor.

Adams deploys a syntax of restraint and recursion, echoing DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, with layered nods to hauntological theory and surveillance aesthetics. The writing is spare, but never minimal. It operates on slow destabilisation: neutral light that isn’t neutral, silence that isn’t silent, drawings that are not seen but interpreted.

“The gallery wasn’t the exhibit. He was.”

This closing revelation is quiet, but total. It retrofits everything before it. The captions beneath the artworks—Schema per Recordar, Memoria Inestable—are not titles, but flags. Metadata. Diagnostic markers for a versioned memory stream in which Josh, and perhaps the reader, have already been indexed.

The section’s most powerful motif is architectural: galleries as bureaucracies of forgetting. The smoked glass, the neutral white, the upward-sloping corridor—all of it signals intent without explanation. The reader is not merely bearing witness to Josh’s entry into the Watcher-system; we are being conditioned to experience the same permissions and denials, to feel the pause before the door push, the scrutiny without source.

What makes Schema so affecting is not its speculative elements—which are implied, never explained—but its emotional fidelity. Josh is not a hero. He is a version. A redundancy. A man who once made systems work, and has now been placed in one.

The recursive framing is sharpest in the description of the artworks: Miró’s spindled lines, Picasso’s spiralled eye. These are not surrealist for ornament. They are memory constructs. Interfaces. Glyphs of cognitive design, etched with error and iteration. In the hands of a less subtle writer, this would lapse into metaphor. Adams keeps it firmly in the domain of encoded architecture.

If Arrival was the ghosted shell of a modernist resort town, Schema is the protocol room beneath it. It announces that Residuals is not about solving the past—it is about being formatted by it. Slowly. Willingly. As if by instinct. 

Isobel Merritt review of Residuals, by Ed Adams

 Isobel Merritt review of Residuals

“What Ed Adams does in Residuals is something I’ve rarely seen: he writes silence as if it were an instrument. This novella doesn’t shout for your attention—it pulls you in with a quiet gravitational force.

The story feels like a heat-shimmered dream of Mallorca, where every shadow and echo hides another century. Josh’s transformation into Farallon is written so delicately that you almost don’t notice when he stops being a man and starts being something else—a Watcher, a witness, a frequency.

The interplay with Elsa is masterful: a thread of tension and recognition, like two people who’ve known each other forever but only just met. The scenes on the yacht, with Zane and Azaria, felt cinematic and unsettling, as if we were watching the architecture of power dissolve into memory.

Residuals bridges Pearl, Tyrant, and Numbers for God, but it’s not just connective tissue—it’s the breath before the dive into The Watcher. A novella you don’t just read—you absorb.”

@CBRadcliffe47 review of Residuals

 @CBRadcliffe47 review of Residuals

“Okay, I’ll admit it—I was wrong to doubt Ed Adams. I didn’t get Tyrant the first time I read it (too sharp, too cynical, I thought). But Residuals? This one got under my skin.

What I assumed would be a ‘bridge novella’ is actually one of his strongest works. It’s tighter, more intimate, but it doesn’t waste a single line. The sequence at Can Prunera with the masks and Elsa—wow. It’s like watching someone translate a dream in real-time.

I love how Adams threads continuity from Pearl, Tyrant, and Numbers for God without overexplaining. He trusts you to find the echoes. And the ending at Reyes Point—honestly? It’s the most satisfying non-ending I’ve read in years. It’s not closure, it’s calibration.

I’m officially converted. Bring on The Watcher.”

Residuals Review by Elsa (ARC Review)

 fragment recovered from Pearl Archive | Sigil-encoded | ██.██.2051)

We didn’t call it a book, not at first. More like a drift-marker, set loose in a place where memory had started collapsing under its own recursion. Residuals isn’t a story—it’s a seam. A soft place in the world where threads from other timelines bleed through.

Josh walks into Sóller with sand in his shoes and someone else’s past in his lungs. He’s not alone. That’s the point. None of us are. The novella folds around that realisation slowly, like fog around a ruined aircraft. One moment you’re reading about citrus and glass, the next you’re halfway through a war you didn’t know you remembered.

It’s an account of convergence. Of what happens when broken timelines stop pretending they were ever separate. Pearl is here. Tyrant is here. Even the ghosts of Numbers ring faintly in the air. But Residuals doesn’t explain itself—it vibrates. Like a low-frequency field effect you only notice once it’s already restructured your thoughts.

My name is in it, yes. But that’s not why I read it twice. It’s because I know what’s coming after. And I needed to be reminded why we intervene at all.

Some books build memories. This one unearths them.

Review: “Arbitrary” – from The Watcher (ARC of Ed Adams novel)

 Review: “Arbitrary” – from The Watcher, by Ed Adams

by RMT (ARC reader of The Watcher)

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Joan Didion and Neal Stephenson collaborated on a time-leaping metaphysical audit of Earth’s possible futures, “Arbitrary” might be your answer.

This chapter plays like an aftershock — not just of the Intervention we’ve seen before, but of knowledge itself. Limantour and Tomales warn that they’ve
outstayed their welcome in this version of Earth — a meta-thread vulnerable to destabilisation, or as they put it, arbitrary shift. (Yes, title drop.) The danger isn’t just relocation, but relocation anywhere — Moon 2, Ganymede, who knows.

What’s striking here is the fusion of warmth and horror. The Watchers aren’t just managing cosmic systems — they’re actively trying to keep the world from collapsing under the weight of its own upgrades. The science — gravity waves, magnetite propulsion, nano-healthcare — feels more like lore than exposition, and Adams is careful to tie everything back to personal stakes. Farallon isn’t just observing anymore. He’s implicated.

When they return to Bodø, there’s something chilling in how casual the timeline manipulation feels. Drake has barely missed them. But the world has changed — already. The tropus has entered public discourse. The cartridge system, with its nanotech delivery and corporate gatekeeping, is on its way. Healthcare becomes monetised, memory becomes fragmented, and an entire hemisphere is about to be wiped from Earthside awareness.

It’s dystopia by degrees: not a single tyrant, but the invisible calculus of optimisation. Torus. Brant. Raven. The names are different, the logic the same — and the moment a product becomes mandatory, you’re no longer the customer.

There’s also a slow horror in the way Abbott is reintroduced — summoned by name like a devil in a mirror. The implication? This isn’t over. It’s barely begun.

In Arbitrary, Adams asks: What if salvation comes bundled with erasure? What if the only way forward is to rewrite memory, territory, and truth itself?

It’s a haunting question. And it sticks.